News & Views | Infinity

Spot customer experience make-or-break talking points in call centres

Written by Matt McGillicuddy | Nov 23, 2022 12:30:00 PM

Have you ever felt the mood of a conversation change? When it comes to driving successful call outcomes, being able to spot those make-or-break moments in a call is a key skill. Your call centre teams need to be able to identify and respond to shifts in mood, sentiment, and tone in real-time, but without the right tools in place to monitor and support, it’s a big ask.

It all comes down to understanding the key talking points. Being able to accurately identify changes in the conversation can help you understand not just what customers say… but what they really mean.

In this blog, we’ll review the importance of sentiment, we’ll explain why talking points are vital in identifying make-or-break moments during calls to your contact centre, and we’ll show you how talking points can help you improve the overall customer experience

What are talking points?

Talking points in a conversation are identified as the moments when the volume of the person speaking changed, their tone changed, or even when they became animated, excited, upset or angry on the phone.

It usually indicates something significant has happened and is a good first port of call when trying to understand what happened.

This is valuable information that you can use to improve experiences and convert and retain more customers, without needing to increase spend on hiring, training or marketing.

Why are talking points important?

Your phone calls are an honest, direct focus group consisting of customers who got in touch with you. Calls can show you what your customers really think, they show you opportunities to capitalise on, they can flag issues that you aren’t yet aware of, they can pull out frequently asked questions, and generally provide you with a massive goldmine of intel that can improve the customer experience.

The best phone agents can take a challenging, unhappy caller, resolve the issue, and turn them into a happy, loyal customer. Monitoring and studying how they can change the call is a crucial piece of the puzzle in improving contact centre performance and maintaining your profit margins.

That’s where talking points come in. Rather than relying on guesswork, you use strategic insight tools that will show you exactly where the problems are, so you can get to work making things better.

 

How talking points can help you improve the customer experience

Understand what makes or breaks a call

One of the most effective ways to improve the customer experience is to understand which talking points led to your desired outcome. This may seem like an impossible task given your agents are likely to be handling hundreds, if not thousands, of calls. But using call monitoring, you can pinpoint those make-or-break moments and harness them to deliver more effective agent coaching and drive more successful call outcomes.

Call tracking provides customer-centric data that allows your entire call centre to become better aligned with customer needs. With customer data at your fingertips, including keyword data and visibility over where calls are coming from, you can boost customer satisfaction and prevent those frustrated hang-ups.

Perfect your objection handling

Call intelligence software can monitor conversations to flag keywords or trends before you’re even aware of them and tie these trends to positive or negative call outcomes, so you know what to do more, or less of.

Using data and outcomes from thousands of phone calls that have gone before you, you can tap into insights at scale and analyse how agents have been able to handle objections in the past. What words, phrases, solutions or incentives did they offer transform hesitant or concerned callers into happy customers? Knowledge is power.

Create winning scripts for your agents

It’s every call centre leader's dream is to have a team of high-flyers capable of reducing average handling times, boosting conversion rates and consistently hitting quarterly revenue targets. But one-size-fits-all training no longer counts. If you want to provide top notch training that boosts customer satisfaction, you need to understand what makes your high-flyers fly high.

Collecting data on how to influence more successful outcomes is the perfect way to train agents faster. With tools like Agent ID, you can evaluate how engaging the calls coming in, and going out, of your contact centre are. Uncover the best calls to rapidly upskill your teams, pre-empting those make-or-break moments and delivering better experiences.

How Conversation Analytics can spot talking points

A common challenge for call centres is the ability to extract customer at scale. With Infinity’s Speech analytics suite, Conversation Analytics, your call centres can begin surfacing hidden insights, highlight topics and keywords, and analyse sentiment in every call.

With Conversation Analytics, you can evolve your tactics based on real data from your customers. Being able to identify the finer points of conversation quickly and easily using call categorisation gives you the context and nuance that can be difficult to track when you’re handling high volumes of calls.

When you put Conversation Analytics and Agent ID together, things get even more interesting. You can gain actionable insights in to how engaging the calls coming in, and going out, of your contact centre are. You can uncover the best calls to use for training, rapidly upskill your teams and decrease average handling time, all while increasing conversion rates and ensuring that your customers are truly satisfied.

Want to find out more about how to take your contact centre to the next level? Start a conversation with us today about Agent ID and Conversation Analytics.