The verdict is in: Contact center investments are increasing to keep pace with the demands of customers.
According to our recent study, 81% said their software budget increased year-over-year. This is on top of the reported $24B in contact center spend from a few years ago.
It’s clear that customer experience is critical to long term business success.
- 86% of customers prefer to interact with a human agent
- 80% of customers prioritize their buying experience just as highly as the product they’re buying.
Unfortunately, there’s an ugly truth to this all: Poor experience with contact center software accounted for $75B in losses, and 78% of customers backed out of intended purchases.
Contact center leaders aren’t always able to extract the full value from their software without additional resources—and this is especially true for conversation intelligence.
Conversation intelligence allows contact center leaders to transcribe and analyze every contact center interaction. It then uses AI and automation to surface insights that improve CX, drive revenue growth, boost operational efficiency and mitigate compliance risk.
While the best conversation intelligence platforms do provide out-of-the-box value, it will lead to the most business impact when these platforms are tuned and optimized for every company's specific business needs and strategic objectives.
Continue reading for more details on these common challenges and how to solve them.
Problem #1: You’re relying too heavily on tools that require too many resources
Many contact center conversation intelligence vendors make the promise of easy implementation and out-of-the-box capabilities. These should be table stakes.
However, with any new system, identifying the insights that matter most to your business is a learning process and accurately calibrating the machine to surface them takes time.
If you don’t have internal speech analytics or development resources on your team, this can be a roadblock, placing you in a long internal queue for your ticket to be handled.
Solution: Research peer-review sites
Sites like G2 provide real-world reviews from real-life customers. When reviewing a product, use the search or filter function to find keywords like “Easy” or “Implementation” to understand the types of resources needed to get immediate value.
Pay attention, in particular, to leaders who rank high for G2’s Implementation Index for any given software category.
How Conversation Intelligence Consulting Services can help
Observe.AI’s new Conversation Intelligence Consulting Services provides speech analytics and implementation resources to take your conversation intelligence ROI to the next level.
We’ll help facilitate a smooth configuration and integration with your current tech stack, then map interaction analytics to your business objectives with high accuracy intent and entity identification, setting the foundation for the most relevant and effective conversation intelligence utilization.
No need to wait in a long queue or to hire head count. You can get deeper insights and activate them across the contact center now.
Problem #2: Your business and operations teams are operating in silos
Let’s face it: Every team has its strengths and weaknesses. That’s exactly why they exist as different teams.
Unfortunately, those rigid team structures are rarely beneficial when it comes to actual cross-functional execution.
Operations teams may be using contact center analytics and BI tools to successfully crunch contact center data in a way that gives you insights, but if those insights aren’t being packaged and turned into action at the business level, you won’t see the performance improvement you’re expecting.
At the end of the day, data is just data. Without proper direction or execution, those insights will be just another talking point on another dashboard.
Solution: Bring teams together early and often
Yes, we all know the pain of too many meetings, but I’d argue that a regular check in between your operations and business teams to share insights and turn them into action is one of the best uses of your time.
This is how the best teams drive meaningful impact: It requires data, alignment, and action.
If meetings really aren’t possible, identify a conversation intelligence platform that can act as a single source of truth for contact center insights so all teams have visibility. Bonus points if that conversation intelligence platform has embedded workflows to turn insights into coaching and training opportunities.
How Conversation Intelligence Consulting Services can help
For a deeper look into the exact actions your business should be making, our Conversation Intelligence Consulting Services can perform a statistical analysis on the actions that would provide the most value.
For example, through deeper analysis, we might identify that bookings rates climb when agents demonstrate a certain level of professionalism, so we would create an action plan and scorecard to recommend a path forward.
Knowing what the actual drivers that affect positive outcomes lets you curate what matters and carry the conversation to other departments for execution. You’ll become more relevant to more initiatives as you build bridges and drive impact beyond your team.
Problem #3: You don’t know which investments are paying off
When it comes to software spend, ROI is the name of the game. Without the ability to prove value in a quantifiable way, you’ll continue to struggle with internal adoption and change management.
This anxiety is only magnified in times of recession or downturn.
Solution: Define and measure your KPIs; partner with vendors who can help
The first big step is to know which key metrics you expect to see change over time from implementing your conversation intelligence platform. With this list in hand, identify ways to track these maniacally and then report on them regularly. Make it easy for yourself by building a standardized template to do so.
There’s one big pitfall to this method, however: It can take a lot of time, effort, and resources that you don’t have.
When in doubt, ask your vendors to help you define, track, and measure ROI from the very beginning. As you go through the purchase process for any new software, ask the sales and customer success teams whether this is something they typically do and whether they have examples of past ROI reports from other customers. Set ROI measurement as an expectation from the outset so you’re aligned.
How Conversation Intelligence Consulting Services can help
Most contact center leaders are focused on running their contact center, not self-reporting on software ROI, which is why we’ll do it for you. We make it simple for business leaders to see the ROI and benefits received from Observe.AI with proven financial models, so you can report back to leadership with confidence.
Software spend is essential to improving performance and growth, but ensuring success is anything but guaranteed. Let us provide the guidance, resources, and confidence for you to do what you do best: Running a contact center.
“Everything is designed to help contact centers maximize the impact of their AI investments, reduce time-to-value, and promote scalable, sustainable business growth,” Swapnil Jain, CEO and Co-Founder of Observe.AI.” Lean in on the CX Paradox narrative.
Go deeper and further with Conversation Intelligence Consulting Services
Software spend is essential to improving performance and growth. Unfortunately, ensuring ROI and success is anything but guaranteed.
“Working closely with the team at Observe.AI has allowed us to excavate deeper insights from our customer interaction data, and apply this intelligence faster and more precisely to drive action across the organization," says Dilhara Kaluarachchi, VP Customer Care Center, Public Storage
Let us provide the guidance, resources, and confidence for you to do what you do best: Running a contact center and driving business results.
Interested in our Conversation Intelligence Consulting Services? Let’s talk.
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