These days, there’s so much more to customer loyalty than delivering the goods on time and in budget. Customers expect you to provide five-star experiences across the customer journey, from the initial research stage on your website or social media channels to their first call to your contact centre.
The ability to analyse conversations at scale to extract historic trends is an important part of developing your customer experience strategy. But what separates the wheat from the chaff is the ability to respond and adapt in real-time. For this, you need real-time customer data.
According to Forbes, 70% of enterprise businesses have increased their spending on real-time customer analytics solutions over the past year. Furthermore, 58% have seen a significant increase in retention and loyalty as part of their efforts. If real-time consumer insights aren’t yet on your roadmap, it’s time to get on board.
In this blog, we’ll explore real-time customer analytics, we’ll provide an overview of the different types of customer analytics available to you, and we’ll explain how to use customer insights and data to enhance the overall customer experience.
What is real time customer analytics?
First things first, what exactly are real-time customer analytics? Real time customer analytics are any analytics that you can track and analyse in the moment, rather than waiting until after the fact to make changes. This usually involves using call monitoring to get live customer data that can be used to drive more successful outcomes.
With real-time call monitoring, or call tracking, you can listen to customer calls with your agents as soon as they happen, providing you with call analytics and dashboards that can highlight keywords, speech patterns and even sentiment. Real-time call monitoring allows you to be more responsive to customer needs by identifying them in the moment, which in turn leads to more high-quality calls and happier customers.
What are the different types of customer analytics?
When it comes to understanding your customers, the opportunities for analytics are endless. There are six commonly recognised types of customer analytics:
- Segmentation analytics
- Customer acquisition analytics
- Customer engagement analytics
- Customer satisfaction analytics
- Customer churn analytics
- Customer lifetime value analytics
Each type of customer analytics offers different insights into who your customers are and what they expect from your business. For call centre analytics, acquisition, satisfaction, churn and lifetime value are all things you can efficiently track and optimise.
What are the benefits of real-time customer insights?
We’ve touched on a handful of benefits, but overall real-time customer analytics can enhance your call centre operations by delivering customer-centric insights that can help you slash spend without negatively impacting the overall experience. The key benefits are:
- Use recordings and transcriptions from real calls to optimise your training - Collecting data on how to influence more successful outcomes is the perfect way to train agents faster. With Agent ID, you can cheery pick the best calls made by your best agents to use for training and accelerating upskilling, while increasing conversion rates and ensuring that your customers are truly satisfied.
- Minimise wait times and reduce pressure with customer intel - Use customer intel to handle enquiries faster, minimising wait time and reducing the overall pressure on your call agents. Detailed intel on topics of conversation can be used to enhance your call deflection techniques and improve the overall customer experience.
- Improve your upselling and cross-selling strategies - If you’re able to identify keywords that drive call outcomes you’re most interested in, you can test scripts and adjust wording to increase conversion rates. Use this to create upselling and cross-selling strategies that are proven to drive real results.
- Engineer more satisfying customer conversations - Satisfying your customers and understanding what makes them tick is the best way of surprising and delighting them. 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.
How can customer analytics be used in real-time?
When it comes to driving more revenue and improving your contact centre operations, being able to spot those make-or-break moments in a call is a key skill. Your agents 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.
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. We like to call them talking points.
But to be able to successfully react to customer feedback and address their needs in real-time, you need to be using the right tools, such as Conversation Analytics.
Which tool is used for real-time data analysis?
Speech analytics software can supercharge call centre performance by providing real-time data on where calls are coming from, to better understand where and why customers pick up the phone.
But a major challenge for call centres is the ability to extract customer insights 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.
Identify common trends or obstacles in your customer journey, highlight FAQs that delay conversion, and pinpoint precisely what turns unhappy callers into loyal customers by recognising talking points. It can tell you:
- Why people are getting in touch, by monitoring and logging the topics of conversation, including any associated keywords and phrases.
- The outcome of each call, so you can surface trends from calls that delivered positive or successful outcomes.
- How customer sentiment is changing throughout the call, so you can pinpoint exactly what makes the phone call experience positive or negative and improve from there.
How are businesses using real-time consumer insights to improve the experience?
Collecting and utilising real-time consumer insights can make your customers happier and reduce your acquisition costs. For Pendragon, a UK-based automotive dealership group, they wanted to drive significant change across their business by truly understanding what their customers wanted.
Every day, they received thousands of calls across its network of brands and dealerships. At this scale, every improvement on these conversations is significant, but without knowing what happens on those calls, it’s difficult to make such improvements. They felt they were missing opportunities and needed a solution.
Using Conversation Analytics, they were able to pinpoint every call where key terms were used, along with additional clarifiers like where in the call they were spoken, or their proximity to other terms. They were able to drive a 63% reduction in cost per acquisition, increase sales and service calls by 12% and reduce common friction points across their major branches by 66%.
Every conversation matters and it’s up to you to find what matters in every conversation. Start one with us today to unlock the benefits of Conversation Analytics and make every second count.
