Preparing Your Contact Center for the Holidays

OPTIMIZING WITH VOICE ANALYTICS

‘Tis the season for making sure your customers get the support they need, any time they need it. The holidays are here, and it’s go time. Online sales alone are expected to reach over $140 billion dollars over the course of the next two months, and your call center will become the first line of defense for your product.

When it comes to purchases, voice is still king, with over half of consumers preferring to call a brand when issues arise or when making high value purchases. To help your call center be successful this season, we have some tips to keep your head above water. Here are the ways you can increase sales, improve customer experience and call center productivity through speech analytics.

Know what’s coming

Whether it’s making sure the lines are properly staffed, or understanding how to generally improve performance, it’s key to review your historical activity reports and data. How did the team perform in the last couple years? Where did things fail? Focus on attainable pain points to immediately increase successful calls. Review your last year call drivers and heat maps, and use those metrics to train your staff accordingly. Using technologies like speech analytics, you can analyze 100% of your calls, and quickly search by topic, keyword, and organic themes to better understand customers needs. This knowledge will better prepare your agents ahead of time, and increase your bottom line. For example, Delta Dental of Washington utilized VoiceBase’s speech analytics capabilities to narrow in on their customer’s needs, and are projecting a 10% decrease in talk time for 2020.

Be proactive with quality assurance

If you aren’t currently employing a speech analytics solution, consider one as an immediate way to extract valuable insights from your calls. With the latest advancements in natural language processing and AI, you can monitor your customer’s language down to the granular emotional data, like tone and pitch. However, your agents are only as good as their training; through an AI-powered solution, agents can review all call data to see what methods perform best, and share that knowledge to better train others. 

Remember that contact centers are most likely the first interaction a customer could have with your company, and that experience can make or break their future with you. Almost half of customers will abandon their loyalty after encountering even one bad customer service experience; that’s why it’s imperative to capture and analyze the voice of your customer to ensure their needs are being interpreted accurately and effectively.

Don’t be shy about having some fun

Your brand is only as strong as its weakest link, even your support line experience. Keep the customer journey fresh to let your customers know that you’re prepared – and excited! – for the holidays. Encourage your agents to have a little holiday fun. Change over the usual hold music to a popular holiday tune to help ease the stress of waiting. Customers responded favorably to experiences that mimic what’s happening around them.

Always be one step ahead

The average call can contain thousands of data points – from customer satisfaction, product mentions, sentiment and more. By analyzing all of your calls automatically, your company can capture an immense amount of customer and brand-centric information quicker than ever. But after you collect it, what do you do with it? Make sure you are creating a way to digest this data with an appropriate dashboard. 

With a speech analytics focused dashboard, you can do it all, such as monitor customer satisfaction ratings, agent performance, dips in call volume, spikes in competitor mentions, potential for churn, or even successful sales. If there is a recurring issue at hand, your dashboard should show organic trends in your calls so that you can be alerted before that issue turns into a crisis. This provides an upper hand through transparency of reassuring customers when it comes to problems that are currently being addressed, but haven’t gotten a fix quite yet; anything you can do to ease holiday stress will attract more consumers to stick around.

Master an omnichannel view of your customer

Call centers are now evolving to contact centers for a reason—your customers aren’t only calling anymore! While it may still be the more popular choice in high value purchases, the evolution of communication technology allows consumers to get in touch with brands beyond phone and email. That’s why VoiceBase has extended their analytics capabilities to text. 

Monitoring your social platforms, emails, and chats can be just as seamless as your calls, providing a single overview of what your customer is looking for. With quality monitoring through all channels, you can comfortably direct a customer to an appropriate channel, and know that their journey is being monitored the whole way.

The holidays are stressful, but they don’t have to be. Your contact center can be a satisfying experience for all those involved, no grinch in sight. To learn more about how to best analyze your customer data, visit our resource hub to help you get started.