Speech Analytics Success Series Part Six: Knowing Your Customer

Last time I wrote about the seven ingredients for a successful Speech Analytics program, I spoke about the ability and willingness to change. This article is about the importance of knowing your customer. We all have our target market and know more about our customer than they do about themselves thanks to analytics. We can anticipate their needs and be ready to respond before they even come to us. But is that knowing your customer or knowing about your customer? The people who know your customer best are your agents. They can tell you about their experiences with the company, or the product or your processes. Unfortunately, agents fall prey to the phenomenon of recency. That is why we have speech analytics, because it allows us to hear the customers in bulk. The key to getting the most out of those bulk conversations is to have categories aligned with your customer actions and if you do not know them you will not get your categories right.

Now I’m sure there are readers thinking I can’t possibly have a category for every customer behaviour or activity because they change. And you are right. That is why you need a Speech tool that will anticipate changes to customers so that you can learn about them before market research tells you. A robust trending functionality will help you stay on top of changes in your customer’s behaviour. The ability to extract themes from trends helps consolidate those bulk conversations so that you can quickly build that new category to reflect this change before the market research tells you about it.

I hope you have found this helpful. Next time I am going to talk about the seventh and final ingredient, knowing the business of serving customers.