In the process of building the biggest retail organization on the planet, Walmart founder Sam Walton liked to remind his employees who was really in charge.
“There is only one boss. The customer,” Walton said. “And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down simply by spending his money somewhere else.”
Walton understood that customers are every company’s most valuable assets. That’s why improving the customer experience should always be a top business priority. One way companies learn more about customer needs and expectations is through the use of advanced analytics within their contact center operations.
Contact Center Analytics and the Customer Experience
Contact center analytics solutions mine data from customer interactions to identify patterns, pinpoint problems and optimize overall operations. By extracting insight from every service-related phone call, email, text message or live chat, organizations can realize a host of benefits.
According to research from McKinsey & Company, contact center analytics not only help companies improve customer satisfaction, they also help improve productivity, reduce costs and increase revenue. The firm found that companies using advanced analytics reduce their average call-handling time by up to 40 percent, improve self-service containment rates by up to 20 percent, cut costs by up to $5 million and boost the conversion rate on service-to-sales calls by nearly 50 percent.
However, the McKinsey study also concludes that nearly two-thirds of companies that use advanced analytics aren’t able to translate insights into action, largely because they lack a coherent and well-defined management strategy. McKinsey’s analysts suggest these companies don’t seem to understand the difference between traditional analytics used for reporting and advanced analytics with powerful predictive capabilities.
Mitel’s AI Contact Center Analytics Solutions
Mitel’s Contact Center solutions address this disconnect by incorporating a variety of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities into its contact center platform. These solutions help ensure that contact center agents gain rapid access to actionable intelligence that help them deliver a more automated and efficient customer experience. Here are some of the ways Mitel leverages AI to extract insight from analytics.
Virtual Agents
Using AI capabilities such as machine learning and natural language processing, virtual agents leverage customer data to create a self-service experience. Chatbots tailor interactions based on the customer’s unique data profile to handle questions quickly and efficiently. By automating the process and minimizing the time customers need with live agents, Mitel Virtual Agents help customers resolve issues quickly while helping agents be more productive in the process.
Agent Assist
Agent Assist monitors and analyzes conversations between customers and virtual agents. When the virtual agent can’t respond to a particular question, the AI is smart enough to bring a live agent into the conversation, as well as provide the agent with the conversation’s history. Agent Assist then continues to monitor the conversation and delivers real-time suggested responses to the agent so they don’t have to spend time searching for answers themselves.
Topic Modeling
Topic modeling algorithms work with your analytics platform to identify topics, keywords and relevant discussion points in call recordings and chat logs, giving agents a powerful level of insight into specific topic areas that customers have been contacting the company about. Armed with this information, agents can tailor recommendations, solutions and actions to improve outcomes.
Advanced analytics can create an end-to-end view of customer interactions across multiple communication channels such as customer relationship management systems, email, voice mail, point-of-sale systems, social media channels and more. However, organizations need a way to make that information available to contact center agents to help them create personalized experiences for customers. Give us a call to discuss how to use Mitel’s AI-powered contact center solutions to keep the boss — your customer — satisfied.