Why Speech Analytics Holds Untapped Potential for Marketers
For today’s marketers, it’s all about the data. By understanding a customer’s journey and their experience of a brand, marketers can constantly tailor their approach to get better results. This knowledge is gained by gathering as much data as possible and then turning it into something meaningful, enabling marketers to get closer to new and existing customers.
Arguably, marketers have been sceptical, historically, about relying on insight gleaned from phone calls - because of concerns over accuracy. Can the technology really understand the nuances of language, for example, and therefore recognise meanings and draw conclusions correctly?
Companies have become increasingly adept at gathering data, particularly via digital channels. But it’s crucial to understand interactions with a brand across every touchpoint, and the insight available from phone calls is still a blind spot for many marketing departments.
That’s not because the tools aren’t there. Call recording and speech analytics aren’t new, and they’re already being used effectively by businesses - particularly as a training tool. But there’s still a huge amount of untapped potential for marketers residing in the call centre.
Trusting the analytics
Arguably, marketers have been skeptical, historically, about relying on insight gleaned from phone calls - because of concerns over accuracy. Can the technology really understand the nuances of language, for example, and therefore recognise meanings and draw conclusions correctly?
Of course, bad data skews all marketing, so it has to be as accurate as possible if it’s going to be of value. But there have been huge improvements in speech analytics technology and it’s now a highly effective tool for identifying patterns and behaviour. It also gives marketers the opportunity to really listen to customers, find out how they’re engaging with the brand and understand whether campaigns are resonating.
Acting on what you learn about conversations that are taking place within the call centre helps to improve the customer experience, which in turn improves the bottom line. This article treats us to no less than 50 stats that prove this – including one which claims 84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue.
So, how can marketers access that value in order to see a greater return on their campaigns?
Analysis at campaign level
Listening to callers and really digging into the complexities of their conversations is where the ultimate secrets of customer behaviour lie. If you’re a travel company and 80% of callers are enquiring about ‘ocean views’, you can use this data as a reliable insight and move budget around in your PPC campaigns to acknowledge that. This is invaluable information that marketers haven’t been able to fully unlock from phone calls.
Using insights from a speech analytics tool, marketers can now more accurately analyse the campaigns that are working in the call centre. It’s not just a case of knowing which campaign performs better than another overall, but which works best on individual channels. This, again, helps with the tailoring of campaigns and when prioritising spend.
Equally, accepting something isn’t working and moving on saves time and money. Marketers need to know if that’s happening in the call centre. Is anything consistently falling on deaf ears? If that’s the case then everyone needs to know and learn from this.
The number of touchpoints and the resulting plethora of data this generates can be daunting for marketers. But what happens in the call centre is a crucial part of the customer experience. This is where your customers are likely to be most engaged, having actively picked up the phone to speak to you. Listen to what they have to say – good or bad. By combining that with insight into how they interact across other channels, marketers can tailor and personalise campaigns, improve the customer experience, increase conversion rates and ultimately see that value on the bottom line.