Words are cheap. 5 reasons why you need to be able to read more into every contact centre call with sentiment analysis. 

Can your contact centre conversations tell you how your customer feels about your business, which products they like – and dislike, and how well your agent is handling their call? And in real-time?

It’s one thing to hear the words a customer says to your contact centre agent, but even more important is the ability to analyse the emotions behind them.

And that’s exactly what a sentiment analysis featured solution can do – it joins the dots between the words your customer says and what they feel. By being able to capture the whole range of caller sentiments (good, bad, neutral, and more), you can build up a powerful and immediate picture of your overall level of customer satisfaction from one call to the next.

How does sentiment analysis work?

Sentiment analysis uses speech transcription, natural language processing, and intelligent search capabilities to understand your customers’ attitudes and responses, detect issues during calls, and automatically categorises your contacts. With cutting edge contact centre systems, AI and Machine Learning algorithms analyse every word in the conversation, and the call can be scored as positive, neutral, or negative.

When aligned against other metrics like call length, KPIs, hold time, CSAT – sentiment analysis provides you with an overall performance score for your contact centre. The results are presented on a real-time dashboard, so your contact centre manager can quickly spot trends and respond to problems before they impact sales or your all-important NPS rating – effectively, your brand. No longer the labour intensive and costly need to manually monitor calls or scan through transcripts, after the fact.

Here are 5 ways sentiment analysis can raise the value of your contact centre and realise ROI.

1. Understand how your customers feel about you, day-by-day, not once a quarter
   Kiss goodbye to tedious and unreliable customer surveys, focus groups, and random call assessments. With sentiment analysis capabilities, you have a full view of how your customers feel about your business and how well your agents perform daily and in real-time, not just every few months, when it’s too late. Identify and address issues on the fly – simply connecting the right agent with the right issue at the right time.
2. Support agents’ performance on the spot, or review reports and learn from them later
   Monitor customer-agent conversations in real-time and get alerts if frustration levels are rising, while your agent is struggling to resolve the issue. Proactively step in while the call is in progress with support, information, and guidance to expedite a better outcome – for everyone! When a customer’s problem is resolved on the first call, only 1% will likely go to your competitor as compared to 15% when the issue is not addressed sufficiently. (VOIP-Info.org, 2020).Post-call sentiment analytics help you understand ongoing trends in your agent-customer conversations and identify opportunities to coach agents who routinely have negative calls.
3. Identify who your most effective agents are and why!
   If you judge how good your agents are by the length of their calls, think again. A long conversation can result from an agent building rapport and handling a complex issue, or simply lacking the ability and skills to close the call. With sentiment analysis, you can identify which agents have consistently positive calls (regardless of length), so you can reward them, learn what they do right – and replicate it!You can also quickly identify repeated patterns of negative call sentiment by agent, and provide coaching to improve performance.
4. Refine your marketing campaigns to maximise your ROI
   It’s not just your contact centre and customer engagement managers who will benefit from sentiment analysis. Your marketers can use it as a tool to refine brand positioning without running focus groups, gain unexpected insights into why customers like specific products and leverage the information to strengthen sales opportunities, gauge the impact of current promotions and price points, react swiftly to feedback on competitor campaigns, and ensure that your advertising messaging reflects and empathises with customers’ real-life needs and pains.
5. Figure out problems, quick smart!
   When you use and review sentiment analysis daily, you can rapidly spot recurring patterns and shifts in levels of customer satisfaction. Imagine being able to identify and understand which ‘negative’ calls lead to customer churn, and why. Conversely, being able to pinpoint ‘wins’ that prompted your customers to praise or thank you. Sentiment Analysis gives your business the opportunity for a hands-on approach to elevate your customer experience (CX).

A quick checklist for choosing a sentiment analysis solution:

So, what are the big questions to ask when considering sentiment analysis software for your contact centre?

• Purpose made – is the solution specifically designed for contact centre conversations?
• Integrated – can it compare sentiment scores in real-time with the other benchmarks you report and depend on, like KPIs and CSAT?
• Capability – will it analyse conversations based on the larger context, not just specific words?
• Time-saving – does it automate the delivery of scores to your dashboards and reports without reverting to manual processes?
• Resources – will it help you identify both your best agents and those needing help?
• Accuracy – does it use machine learning and superior speech analytics to give you precise results?
• Ease of use – will it make analysis and reporting a breeze, not a chore?
• Simplicity – can you use it out-of-the-box, or does it require configuration?

Customer emotions, especially when expressed on social media, are a powerful thing. And woe betides any business that fails to note and act early, on an incoming tide of negativity. If you don’t have sentiment analysis capabilities in your contact centre, it’s probably time to listen more closely to what your customers are telling you.

Find out more about how Digital Island can help you get a little sentimental.