Emotion trumps the product and the price. But how to capture and measure it?
In June, Forrester’s researcher Megan Burns caused a bit of a stir during New York Forrester’s Forum For Customer Experience Professionals proclaiming, that among the three customer experience dimensions – ease, effectiveness, and emotion, the last one plays the biggest role.
Emotion trumps the product and the price. But how to capture and measure it?
In June, Forrester’s researcher Megan Burns caused a bit of a stir during New York Forrester’s Forum For Customer Experience Professionals proclaiming, that among the three customer experience dimensions – ease, effectiveness, and emotion, the last one plays the biggest role.
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Emotional engagement has been touted as the strongest loyalty driver for quite some time now. This has led to the implementation of the Voice of Customer programs, yet resulted in brands often struggling with an unusual challenge – capturing, analysing and measuring emotion.
I just call to say I love you
The metric often adopted to reflect a customer’s perception of a brand is Net Promoter Score. NPS provides a measurement of the overall satisfaction with the company. This, however, is based on surveys that allow for little specification and doesn’t provide information about the events that triggered the customer’s perception of the brand.
While it is impossible to ask customers how do they feel at every stage of their journey, there is a largely untapped source of data that can provide a hefty chunk of that information. Every day, enterprise servers store thousands of minutes of phone calls, during which customers are voicing their opinions, wishes and complaints about the brand, product or service, and sharing their feelings in their purest form.
Even though call recordings are a feedback goldmine, they also present a challenge; a mass of unstructured, and thus unusable data. Identifying and structuring this information is the task of Conversation Analytics. There’s also a bonus. Vocal layer of speech is a unique source of knowledge about emotions. It doesn’t rely on statements, it is honest, unbiased feedback. How convenient, considering that the phone call is still the most frequently used medium for connecting with brands.
Quantyfying feelings
Despite the variety of channels available, customers still prefer talking to a live agent. According to Call Centre Helper report, “What Contact Centres are Doing Right Now” social media inquiries constitute only 3% of total amount of interaction, trumped by email (26%) and a surprisingly high 68% for phone calls. Sounds like numbers from 2001? Not quite. This research study was conducted only a year ago. The findings presented in Parature’s 2015 U.K. State of Multichannel Customer Service are even more astounding – 81% of clients contact brands on the phone on regular basis.
Conversation Analytic platforms use a bundle of algorithms called EVS (Emotional Voice Streams). EVS decodes the vocabulary and searches for relationships between words and phrases to establish the topic of the dialogue as well as sentiment, simultaneously analysing non-verbal audio cues to decode information about the emotional state of the speakers.
The emotion is marked on a 5-degree scale varying from strong negative to strong positive. The value is assigned to each word. Conversation Analytics uses data stream created by EVS to discover common patterns – like expressions and events that trigger negative reactions, time of the day when customer’s show highest discontent, or agents who show great talent in managing angry customers.
Attitudes in their natural habitat
Customer Experience creates a constant thirst for analytical input. Unfortunately, consumers are famous for their blatant disregard for all kinds of questionnaires. What an irony, considering that they like nothing better than giving companies a piece of their mind. The only crux is that customers voice their opinions when and where THEY see fit.
Surveys ask clients for a review usually minutes after they have just called and shared their thoughts on the product, service and company. Filling out an additional survey not only creates a sense of investing extra effort (especially in the case of interactions that did not go perfectly well), it also sends a message “You called and spoke, but we didn’t listen”.
Somewhere between the “Hello, how can I help you?” and “Thank you! Goodbye” there are thousands of words and phrases, which contain information about speaker’s feelings. When organised, they constitute the ultimate source of knowledge about the customers; personalised and specific, encompassing and universal.
At the moment, the industry standard is to fish in the desert, rather than cast the nets where the fish live. Start taking advantage of your contact centre and get the feedback where it’s already waiting.