Continuing on from last week’s blog (Case 1), we present you with our second Use Case of how applying the right deep dive analysis with the right tools and domain expertise/mindset can uncover some fascinating insights into what’s really impacting your business metrics and customer service outcomes.
Use Case 2.
Managing Escalations by focussing on agent soft skills
In another recent engagement we were asked to help reduce escalations to supervisors, in an environment where the agents were quite restricted in that they could only provide information, and not advice. Frustrated customers would often seek to speak to a supervisor, but on the other hand the agent knew that any escalation to a supervisor would only result in exactly the same conversation they were having so would tell the customer this would not help.
Using speech analytics to analyse these calls, we could focus on the conversation at the point in time the customers requested to talk to someone more senior. Sifting through the layers, we were able to identify that agent’s exhibiting empathy through the discussion and better explaining why an escalation would not actually help the customer performed much better than … let’s call it “other more direct styles”. The latter would get people’s backs up and result in a transfer to a supervisor, ultimately increasing AHT and decreasing customer satisfaction.
This engagement was very interesting because we were able to work with the client around some of the soft skills agents should be looking to apply, and to identify examples of best practices that avoided costly and unnecessary escalations. The results were less escalations, reduced AHT, and customer satisfaction scores increasing.
From our experience, it’s well worth peeling away the layers and doing the deep dive to see what can be done to improve your outcomes for your business / agency and for your customers. Often it is the unexpected that gets discovered that can make the real difference in understanding the root cause drivers, and when actioned can significantly improve your key business performance metrics.
To be successful, it ultimately comes down to a combination of domain expertise, the right analytics techniques & tools and an inquisitive mindset to identify the unknown. Domain expertise on its own doesn’t have all the tools. Being a data scientist might have all the tools and techniques but can lack the domain expertise to identify the root causes. However, when you bring all these elements to the problem at hand, you will always find something, and that something will be actionable and significantly improve the way you run your service.
When’s the last time you sifted through the (data) layers in your Contact Centre, and what was waiting for you on the other side?
