Are you listening? Customer phone call analytics for unlocking insights

Big data and a lack of financial resources are the biggest obstacles for marketers when it comes to driving customer insights from data, a recent US report claimed. Marketers are under increasing pressure to find ways that they can analyse big data, without the big price tag. One of the tools they can use, which is simple and cost effective, is gathering data from the phone conversations their organisations are having with their customers.

If organisations listen to every conversation, they will quickly understand where the heart and soul of the business or brand is. For the first time in history, technology is enabling marketers to really tune into the customer ‘voice’ as well as the internal voice of your staff.

Without a voice component, how can a business truly validate what it is being told? How does it understand what its customers and staff are really saying? Without this there is no way to be certain your marketing strategies, advertising and sales pitches are going to be effective.

Marketing departments can access valuable data from phone conversations between their customers and their sales or customer service teams and learn how products are received or how successful a recent promotion was. Unlocking conversations verbatim, taking the spoken word and converting it to text for analysis with sentiment and emotion can lead to powerful insights. It is also the only frontier a competitor cannot easily replicate – the relationship an organisation has with its customers.

Recording phone conversations is no longer just about documentation, risk management, coaching and training, it can help marketers improve their Net Promoter Scores and marketing strategies, help to benchmark return on investment and gain critical insights into customer behaviour. If we are in the century of the customer, then a CMO’s greatest challenge is to accurately measure ROI, which is not an easy task when investments are often disparate, unstructured and across many different media.

Call analytics enable CMOs to pinpoint key themes and topics embedded in conversations and concentrate on the elements that really matter. Now you can optimise and understand the true context of words to avoid organisational misunderstandings and increase conversational transparency. You also discover what your customers, potential customers and staff are saying and feeling about products, brands and service. The value of this information helps you to connect and create deeper, more meaningful relationships with customers and staff, so you can drive business growth.

How do you begin to unlock this valuable information? The first step is to commence tracking. You can provision specific phone numbers to specific campaigns. Then start recording and capturing data from valuable conversations. Once you have the data it can be analysed for social and textual intelligence. The insights will inform the organisation on a myriad of levels. It will change the way you target customers, understand their needs and overcome challenges.

Approaching ROI in this manner is the perfect focus group for the needs, feelings and responses of your customers. Many large banks and telcos are utilising the technology to avoid customer frustration and keep conversations running smoothly. The power of knowing is the power of doing something real about the challenges of engagement.

Success is the goal – your competition can’t copy your relationship with your customers. They can’t replicate the experience you provide when it is uniquely developed based on insights from real customer data.

Andrew Lamrock
BY Andrew Lamrock ON 23 August 2013
Andrew Lamrock is director of enterprise intelligence at Call Journey.