On the quest to becoming remarkable in your customer interactions
In the previous post, we discussed the importance of crafting emotion-centric customer experience, and we presented how positive language and Sentiment Index impact the overall customer satisfaction, and sales outcomes. We’ve also seen that no matter how positive and skilled your agents are, your customers want quick resolution in order to give you high customer satisfaction scores (CSAT). One of the key learnings was that to bring your customer satisfaction up you need to eliminate the negative emotion in the first place.
A natural next question is: How do you eliminate negative emotion? In the next two posts, we’ll dig deeper into this, on the way to crafting an emotion-centric customer experience, first looking into Actions — what you do, and secondly looking into Communication — how to communicate with your customers.
What You Do — The Importance of Being Remarkable
In Oversubscribed, Daniel Priestly talks about the importance of being Remarkable. Remarkable with your product, with your services, with your customer interactions. I’d extend this further and encourage this concept outside of your business into your private life. If you strive to be remarkable with every step (or breath) you take, this will then establish that habit of striving for excellence that will soon be embedded in everything you do, and naturally become visible in your product or service.
What this means is that step zero in having exceptional customer service is to eliminate the interaction by giving your customers an excellent product or service. And if you can’t fully eliminate the interaction due to the nature of your business, at least you can be sure that negative interaction is minimised.
How do you maintain that quality in the ever-changing market with new products or features always being added or updated? How do you know your customer preference and what your customers like or dislike?
What You Do — The Importance of Understanding your Customers
A lot of companies collect customer feedback post-interaction in order to revise and improve. While post-interaction feedback is better than no feedback, it lacks the real-time element, and by the time you see the causes of customer frustration, your customers might have already churned. While post-interaction customer feedback could complement real-time interaction insights, if you are interacting on a daily basis with your customers, these interactions could be a gold mine for your bottom line.
In Figure 7 we see an example from Sentient Machines, grouping negative calls by topics.
Figure 7: Hear Your Customers: Sentient Machines real-AI platform for discovering insights from your customer interactions
We can see that ‘App’ is causing most frustration for customers, but what about the app? Drill into the bubble view to learn that the app doesn’t work on Huawei phone, and that customers have trouble downloading it, and communicate this to your development team in order to eliminate this negative emotion — to eliminate this unnecessary customer interaction at the first place.
Your app should simply work, and if it doesn’t, your priority should be to fix it if this is what your customers need.
What You Do — The Importance of Reacting to Your Customer Needs in Real-time
The quality of your product and services is critical to the success of your business, and learning from your customers in real-time about how you could improve could be transformative for your bottom line. Automated analysis of your customer interactions can help you answer questions such as:
What business needs to do today to eliminate root causes of customer frustration?
Why are customers not buying?
Which features excite customers and which don’t?
We’ve already touched upon using advanced AI conversational analytics such as Sentient Machines to extract root causes of customer frustration. In a similar way, you could adjust the platform to look for answers to other questions. For example, if during your sales calls your agents ask customers for reasons for their cancellations, you could have these grouped, and quantified, so that your executive team can make more data-driven decisions and use them to gain competitive advantage.
With real-time aspect of analysis, you would be learning every hour about customer preferences, without having to wait for your post-interaction customer feedback analysis.
We’ve seen up to 60% churn reduction when analysing customer data, simply by alerting the customer of highly negative cancellation calls in real-time. In the case where the Head of Contact Centre Operations reacted to these within 2 hours, 49% of customers were brought back and eventually didn’t cancel. Now, imagine if they reacted a week or a month later? Those customers would have been already lost to a competitor. Timely reacting to customer interactions insights is key and can be transformative to your bottom line.
While confidently making improvements to your products and services, you should at the same time take care that your team is well trained to understand the company vision and make sure that every customer feels valued when they interact with you. This communication element is a big part of the company culture and could be transformative for the success of your business.
In the next post, we’ll present 5 key points extracted from a case study where we analysed thousands of conversations and looked into what worked and what didn’t with regards to Agent Communication in order to improve sales outcomes.
