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Swell Your Sales With Speech Analytics
February 25, 2008
By Jeff Gallino
From cross-selling in the contact center to online marketing campaigns, companies today are always looking for ways to generate new revenue. But how do you know if a marketing campaign is working? How can you make sure contact center agents are fully leveraging cross-sell and up-sell opportunities? How can you tell whether your efforts are keeping customers loyal or driving them away?
The problem is, you can't … at least, not using traditional methods and metrics. Sure, you can tally up the totals after a major promotion and find out whether it was a rousing success or a major flop. (Of course, if it was the latter, it will be too late to do anything about it.) And yes, you can listen to random calls to see how well agents are cross-selling or up-selling.
But you'll have no way of knowing whether the calls you happen to hear accurately reflect activity throughout the contact center. As far as loyalty and churn are concerned, you can use customer satisfaction surveys and exit interviews. But you're likely to find that they often provide too little information, too late, to have much effect.
So what's the alternative? For more and more companies today, the answer is speech analytics, an automated tool for gathering customer intelligence that affects sales. In its most advanced form, speech analytics can listen to and accurately analyze 100% of the content of 100% of customer conversations recorded in the contact center, providing you with critical insights to positively impact sales and marketing efforts.
Maximizing Sales Opportunities
Cross-selling and up-selling in the contact center represent important opportunities to generate additional revenue at minimal cost. Companies can use CRM systems or examine customer transaction records to determine whether a customer has accepted an offer. But what they won't find out is whether an offer was actually made in the first place, if the offer was rejected, why it was rejected or accepted, and what the agent might have said to affect the outcome of the attempt. Advanced speech analytics uncovers all of this information. With this knowledge, a company can accurately monitor the percentage of offers made, track the results and take corrective action as necessary.
For example, one company that employed an advanced speech analytics solution was surprised to learn that its contact center agents were taking advantage of opportunities to up-sell warranty upgrades only about 11% of the time. Even worse, only a small percentage of those up-selling attempts (16%) were successful. Based on this information, the company instituted an initiative to increase up-sell attempts to 33%, for direct potential earnings of $3 million annually.
Increasing Loyalty, Reducing Churn
Keeping customers and cultivating their loyalty is critical to any company's success today. Advanced speech analytics can help increase loyalty and reduce churn by detecting the signs of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction—not only after the fact (as with customer surveys and exit interviews), but as they are developing. This puts the company in a position to take action addressing these trends before they negatively affect the customer relationship.
Advanced speech analytics also can identify and track specific trends in customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction over time. For example, is there a particular indicator of customer dissatisfaction that keeps coming up, such as asking to speak to a supervisor? Is it associated with a particular issue? A particular agent? Knowing this kind of information can help companies understand trends before they become issues.
Tracking Campaign Effectiveness
Marketers can use advanced speech analytics to measure the effectiveness of campaigns and promotions by gathering relevant intelligence from contact center calls. This includes the number of times callers mention a brand, product or service that's being promoted, whether they use language associated with the offer and various other indicators. The process can be undertaken while a campaign is in progress, rather than after the fact, to let marketers know whether the effort is paying off. If it isn't, they can quickly devise and roll out a new approach, if necessary. Over time, intelligence on multiple campaigns can be tracked to identify overall trends that warrant further analysis or action.
Keep Tabs on Customer Preferences
Advanced speech analytics can reveal a great deal about customer preferences that companies can use to increase close rates. Knowing the reason why customers are rejecting a particular offer, for example, helps a company to understand what customers want (and don't want) so that it can then improve its offers based on customers' expressed desires. And knowing why customers are accepting a particular offer affords the company an opportunity to generate more revenue by reinforcing the offer to other customers.
Finally, the deep understanding of customer preferences that speech analytics fosters can help maximize customer lifetime value by enabling companies to offer customers more of the products and services that they are likely to buy.
Sidebar: Seeking Your Own Solution
Speech analytics is constantly undergoing improvement, and the solutions that are available today incorporate the latest advances to varying degrees. Sales and marketers would do well to look for solutions that:
1. Take into account not just what customers are saying, but how they say it. Some solutions focus solely on the words and phrases that customers use when speaking with contact center agents. But non-speech characteristics, such as how fast or how loudly someone is speaking, can reveal just as much about the content of a call as the words themselves. The most effective solution will have the technology to measure speed and volume, detect stress and even calculate the effect of meaningful silences in conversations.
2. Develop, detect and track indicators of meaning. The ideal solution will be capable of putting together a set of indicators that is relevant to a particular company and its issues. These could be things such as customers mentioning competitors, reacting negatively or stating an intention (for instance, "I'm never going to do business with you again"). For cost-effectiveness, look for a semi-custom solution that offers a base set of indicators, but can develop additional company- or industry-specific ones, as well.
3. Analyze the content from more calls, quickly and cost-effectively. Few solutions have the capability to analyze 100% of calls without requiring a cost-prohibitive server investment to process thousands of hours of content daily. But analyzing all recorded calls is critical to ensuring that valuable customer intelligence isn't lost to calls that go unscreened. Look for a solution that includes the technology to mine the data from all calls and can do it using existing servers.
Advanced speech analytics can open the door for virtually any business to improve sales performance and marketing effectiveness. The key to using it successfully is to find a solution that fully incorporates the latest advances in the technology. In the end, your efforts will pay off big-time.
Jeff Gallino is chairman, co-founder and chief technology officer of CallMiner, Inc. He can be reached at info@callminer.com or 239-689-6463.
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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