How voice technology eliminates poor customer experiences and improves customer satisfaction

The link between customer experience, brand reputation and revenues

Poor customer experiences – leading to customer churn – cost U.S. companies $1.6 trillion a year in lost sales, according to Forbes – so it's important to eliminate those bad experiences as quickly as possible. Traditionally, the focus has been on NPS and CSAT scores to improve customer satisfaction in call centers. But what does NPS stand for? And what does CSAT mean? Most importantly of all, how can voice technology be harnessed to transform the customer experience?

NPS stands for Net Promoter Score – a customer loyalty and satisfaction measurement taken from asking customers how likely they are to recommend a product or service to others on a scale of 0-10. CSAT is a Customer Satisfaction Score – a metric used to quantify the degree to which a customer is happy with a product, service or experience. This metric is usually calculated by deploying a customer satisfaction survey that asks on a five or seven-point scale how a customer feels about a support interaction, purchase or overall customer experience.

NPS and CSAT both uncover information on customer satisfaction but, in recent times, customer experience has become a priority for businesses and is being championed over other initiatives. Better customer understanding enables brands to provide personalized and better experiences while creating customer loyalty.

Customer experience has a direct impact on a brand’s reputation and revenues. A brand’s ability to understand its customers enables it to create exceptional customer experiences. From purchase decision and payment method to delivery and after-sales support, the ability to streamline these touchpoints builds customer loyalty through frictionless experiences.

Contact centers are an important touchpoint in the buyer journey

The contact center is a vital communication touchpoint for most brands. It represents the front line in terms of customer experience and offers insights into customers across their buying journey. Even for elements considered outside its remit – such as delivery or purchase – it’s the contact center that delivers insights into how customers feel about these experiences. A brand’s NPS is heavily reliant on the way the contact center communicates with customers.

The call center is one of the best places to gather NPS and CSAT data. It’s the point at which the customer is most engaged and can provide feedback on their experiences.

Call center NPS and CSAT have the potential to deliver significant insights for brands. For organizations focused on delivering enhanced customer experience, benchmarking is important for them to understand their position and implement data-driven initiatives to improve their scores. However, while a single data point offers a great representation of an overall attitude at a fixed moment in time, it does not provide sufficient context as to why customers feel the way they do. To that end, CSAT and NPS have limitations.

Voice technology can eliminate poor customer experiences in real time

With voice technology, call centers can build on NPS and CSAT scores to truly understand customer loyalty and feelings and avoid negative experiences. Using real-time transcription capabilities, agents can positively impact calls as they happen – with contact centers deploying speech recognition technology in real time to trigger workflows that assist agents during the call.

As well as learning from previously failed interactions, real-time workflows are helping contact center agents positively steer conversations before they go off track. The advantage of this is that customers aren’t required to have a bad experience before agents offer personalized and exceptional experiences.

Non-compliant behavior can be mitigated by alerting a supervisor when certain words or phrases are mentioned on a call. Moreover, if certain questions are raised by customers, knowledge base articles can be prepopulated and surfaced to the agent’s dashboard to help guide the conversation.

Real-time transcription also empowers tools like sentiment analysis to help agents deal with a variety of customer emotions. This is a proactive approach to call center NPS and CSAT scores which enables organizations to roll out next-generation tools to meet the demands of customer experience.

Conclusion: Voice technology holds the key to eliminating poor experiences to improve customer satisfaction in the call center

Voice technology is making it easier and more efficient to understand the voice of the customer and deliver products, services and experiences that customers truly care about.