Collecting customer data is the starting point in improving customer experience. Yet it’s not just important how the data is collected, what organisations actually do with the data is paramount. Various types of analytical insights can make a tremendous difference when it comes to how organisations interact with customers. Having the history of each and every customer interaction at hand might make or break your business.
The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed organisations to adapt to shifting customer expectations by accelerating digital transition and moving to the cloud. In fact, Calabrio’s 2021 State of the Contact Centre report reveals that 68 percent of cloud migrations occurred during the last year alone. Cloud-based solutions with integrated omni-channel capabilities have been shown to help agents with daily customer inquiries in contrast to agents that have to use on-premise solutions.
In an exclusive interview, CX Today welcomes Ed Creasey, Director of Pre-Sales at Calabrio to walk us through all the benefits of the cloud for analytics and how an analytics-based approach reflects on the customer experience.
True Cloud Capabilities
“Calabrio has always led with workforce engagement management (WEM) in the cloud. The basics of the cloud are well known by now, such as the ability to scale your business as large or as small as you need it. It also provides infrastructure and capabilities without the huge investment that organisations normally have to have when they're hosting it on premise. “
The cloud is fast becoming known for enterprise-grade built-in security and business continuity, along with enough storage and computing power for constant innovation. These are the essentials that businesses are looking for. One of the major cons of on-premises solutions is the slow implementation of innovation, which can take months or even years to happen. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are instantly available with cloud-based solutions, as opposed to on-premises.
As the report finds, two-thirds of contact centres now recognise that the cloud goes beyond cost-efficiency or flexibility – it directly drives more strategic, smarter business decisions.
Creasey explains:
“For instance, when being more strategically data-driven, it's very important to have an integrated suite of capabilities. This means getting all your data from your customer journeys, voice calls, messages, chats, emails, social all together into one place, and having a consistent user experience. Equally, if using multiple platforms and vendors to extend functionality, cloud to cloud integrations are key, as that makes sure everything talks to each other.
“The way we try and build our cloud solutions is with a lot of customer feedback in mind. We're always looking for our end users to give us ideas. Two-thirds of our features come from our community.
“We have an innovation centre that builds products based on their ideas, and they rapidly ideate and design innovations that go into our cloud. Calabrio provides a marketplace of vendors where our customers can buy other vendors’ products. We call this co-opetition, that is cooperative competition where we enable other vendors to sell on our cloud marketplace, with the applications pre-approved by Calabrio as quality assured and fully integrated."
Customer Journey Analytics
Analytics and customer experience are closely connected in a way that using analytics not only keeps you in the loop with each client interaction but also boosts customer experience by making each interaction count. According to the report, 7 in 10 cloud-powered contact centres say that cloud solutions are enhancing analytics insights for customer and employee data.
Creasey begins:
“You can’t really understand customer experience without analytics. Traditionally there's a couple of tools being used, which both have inherent challenges. One is quality management or QA which is a manual assessment of the quality of a customer-agent experience. These are critical, but they suffer in a couple of areas, one of which being sample size. Human beings can only do so many at a time, and typically that's less than 2% of the total customer experience.”
With human beings assessing other humans’ experiences, there is equally a risk of bias. A number of factors can influence the assessment making it highly subjective. The same issue applies to customer survey tools like Net Promoter Score and customer satisfaction surveys. The surveys are often responded to by very happy or very unhappy customers, so the data can be inherently skewed. Furthermore, the declining volumes in these surveys show consumers are exhausted by getting surveyed affecting the real scores and experiences they had.
Creasey continues: “Analytics from a Calabrio perspective means AI-powered interaction analytics across 100% of omnichannel contacts. This analyses phone calls, text (email, chat, asynchronous messaging), social and video, as well as agent desktop usage. We put together what the customers are saying and how the agents are responding in one interface. Everything is recorded, indexed and 100% searchable. From these you can start building use cases.”