CallMiner – the reason voice calls aren’t leaving the contact centre

Despite more customers turning to digital channels — such as chat or self-service options — to engage with brands, one thing remains true: there will always be a place for voice calls in customer service. While automation technology and AI increasingly have their important places in contact centres, we continue to invest in maintaining the voice aspect of customer service. The phone is and remains the true empathy channel, which is a critically powerful element in the customer experience.

Empathy, in combination with ownership and action, is why customers continue to pick up the phone despite brands’ omnichannel presence across social media, email, and live chat. It provides the ability to interpret and respond to the hundreds of vocal cues we have in conversations – the millisecond of silence, the barely audible intonation, the emotion placed on certain words – or what we might call in the increasingly techy business world, ‘the human touch’.

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The contact centre often serves as an emotional component of a brand that’s available on-demand, long after the customer has made a purchase. That’s because today’s automation and AI solutions simply can’t handle the complex issues that customers need solving. More so than any other channel, voice calls with professional live agents satisfy the human need to feel valued and understood. Done well, in the short term, voice calls can reassure customers that they’re making the right purchase or are sticking with the right brand for a certain service. In the long term, human-to-human voice interactions have the potential to foster personal understanding, drive more efficient conversations, and create a genuine emotional and memorable affinity between a customer and brand.

Those advantages translate to quicker calls, better conversion rates, and enhanced brand loyalty in a more black-and-white business sense. In an environment where customer experience comes first, its building blocks comprise empathy.

Human empathy is invaluable in business, but its effects can be improved with the application of a little technology. Let’s be clear: when we say there will always be a place for the voice call in customer service, we don’t mean there’s no place for innovation.

A data leader, in conversation

Founded in 2002, CallMiner has been central in developing and establishing the speech and conversation analytics industry. The company provides organisations with the tools to analyse and gain deep understanding from customer interactions, across every channel. The insights extracted from interactions can be used to make better business decisions, from delivering the best customer experience in the contact centre to driving enterprise-wide improvement.

Organisations across industries such as financial service, energy & utilities, retail and more, use CallMiner to analyse the conversations between businesses and their customers – primarily those that happen over the phone, but also across online chat, email, social media messaging, and more. Mentioning when CallMiner’s inception date is significant because dealing with conversational data in its heaviest and least structured form requires vast troves of experience and expertise, which the company has been developing, honing and leading for nearly 20 years.

The CallMiner Eureka platform works by mining conversations from customer phone calls, chats, and other text – and analyses at scale to identify areas of opportunity across customer question trends, agent performance and more. Interactions are then automatically categorised, with CallMiner assigning tags to customer contacts based on their language patterns and use of predetermined keywords and phrases, among a trove of other characteristics. Categories or tags can be configured and organised to suit specific businesses’ needs, and uncovered metrics can provide significant insights to both sides of all conversations.

CallMiner can help brands identify if certain products, such as those of competitors, are mentioned more frequently, enabling businesses to explore product expansion or differentiation. Further, contact centre operators can search previous conversations to ensure compliance procedures are being followed correctly or just how well customers respond to upsell offers. If the customer is expressing dissatisfaction, agents can be automatically prompted with next-best responses aimed at delivering the best outcomes from customers and the organisation.

With CallMiner, contact centres can access entirely new metrics-based perspectives on their operations, such as efficiency based on the volume of silence on calls, average handle time, and agent quality. Gathered insights provide coaching opportunities which can also improve ongoing performance through better agent training. This includes identifying issues and root cause identification on specific calls that supervisors can use to help agents understand why their action on a call did or didn’t work.

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Opportunities for improvement come from CallMiner’s ability to automatically score every individual agent on characteristics such as understandability, compliments received, the level of empathy demonstrated and outcomes achieved – and how all of these and more are improving (or not) over time. Supervisors can even do this in real-time during calls, providing feedback and support on-the-fly that could help agents close a deal or handle tricky conversations like complaints.

These insights deliver the potential to improve business beyond the contact centre. The sales team can gain insight into why customers are buying a product that may have previously been unknown, or high-performing agents can share their expertise department-wide to reduce agent turnover.

Good conversations pay off 

Gathering information using automated systems serves two ends. The first is clearly one that uses technology as a series of powerful aids to improve the overall quality of customer experiences. From individual call agents’ performance up to the strategic decisions made in the boardroom, CallMiner helps organisations get better at what they do, year on year.

But the additional layers of information that CallMiner provides helps companies develop their human interactions in terms of quality, outcome and degree of empathy with each customer. Because there will always be a voice channel for companies that care about their end-users, it’s each organisation’s responsibility to help improve how people talk to people — and that’s where CallMiner comes in.

CallMiner processes 500,000 calls per hour and one trillion words per year. Each one is an opportunity to better develop the bonds between company and customer. To learn more about the technology that makes this possible, click here to organise a demo or get in touch directly for more information.