By Anil Chawla, MD, Customer Engagement Solutions, Verint
In the last several years some of the most powerful and successful companies including leading BPO’s have not only realized the need to collect and mine customer information but have also derived Actionable Intelligence through powerful analytics tools.
Let’s explore a couple of examples from global BPOs. The first case study showcases how speech analytics is instrumental in garnering sales.
There are two ways in which organizations can generate sales through contact centers:
• Inbound calls
• Outbound calls
Case Study 1: Speech analytics implementation at one of Asia’s leading BPOs helped generate more sales through outbound calls.
The need
One of the BPO’s clients selling cosmetic and health food through home –shopping TV advertisements wanted to enhance sales through the subscription model. The team responsible for the outbound calls was in charge to offer a monthly subscription for the one time purchase customers. The shortlisted customers had ordered the products a month before the launch of the monthly subscription scheme.
Challenges
• The month on month prospect list was not exhaustive.
• Could customers who had purchased the product a year back (sleeping customers) be targeted?
• Cross sell new products to customers who had recently purchased a product.
To address the challenge the Asian BPO built a standard script for sleeping customersbut the script did not show the desired results. It was assumed that lucrative offers like “buy one get the other one free” would result insignificant increase in sales.
How speech analytics addressed the challenges:-
• Speech analytics surface that mentioning the cost of in the beginning of the call was not effective and in many cases a sales detractor.
• The customers didn’t remember buying the product so they tried to hang up the call soon; as a result the agents rushed to mention the price to keep them on the call. However, mentioning the price when the customers’ buying intention wasn’t high enough gave the impression that the agents are force selling.
Changes recommended & made in the calling script after leveraging speech analytics insights:
| Before implementing speech analytics | Result post speech analytics implementation |
| Thank you for using our product. How did you like the product? | · Thank you for purchasing the product before.
· How is your skin condition after use? |
| This time, we can offer 2 products for the price of one.
Usually it’s X per product but we are offering 2 products for this price. |
The product will be delivered in a set of 2.
One is a free gift for you. |
Result: The speech analytics Impact for Asian BPO:-
• There was a 20% increase in the target order rate.
• The BPO saw increased sales by $ 500,000.
Mapping voice of the customer analytics (VoCA) for a multichannel customer
A multichannel customer needs multi-layered analytics to understand:-
• Why are the customers contacting, what are they feeling?
• The customers’Interaction journey, their key issues.
• Analysing the root cause and for prompt customer redressal.
Case Study 2: One of India’s largest Global BPOs helped a leading UK based bank by deploying multi-tier analytics for multi-channel customers. VoCA included speech analytics, text analytics and customer feedback survey solutions.
Challenges
• Customer engagement channels worked in silos.
• Unclear digital strategy
• There were six different interaction channels for customers to reach out to.
| Mapping channel performance for the UK bank | VoCA Implementation |
| 15% customers repeatedly contact across channels | Alternative channel strategy for secure messages proposed |
| 60% repeats on the secured messages with low satisfaction scores. | Streamlining account opening processes |
| 21% contacted through the website | Automating data capture processes |
| Complicated self-serve procedures. | IVR &mobile app optimization |
| Simplifying self-serve procedures. |
The analytics to multi-layered VoCA deployment helped the UK based bank to:-
• Reduce repeat calls by 18%
• 12-15% reduction in customers switching channels
• 10-15% uplift in self-service channels.
The need for Indian BPOs to deploy VoCA
As Indian organizations are embarking on their digital journey, VoCA implementation will be integral to their digital channel strategy. It will help the BPOs to bridge the gap between traditional channels of customer engagements and self-service channels.
As discussed through the Asian BPO use case, it will help Indian BPOs to upgrade themselves in their customers’ business value chain.
• Enable BPOs to know their customers’ customers better:-
• Increase customer satisfaction (C-Sat) and reduce churn
• Help in broad base compliance risk
• Lead to operational efficiency and cost savings
It is not only imperative for organizations to improve the self-service channels, but also optimize the traditional channels by prudent use of speech, text and customer feedback mechanism. As organizations are prepping for personalized Customer Experience (CX), real time VoCA would be the future game-changer.