Providing good customer service is one of the most essential parts of managing a contact centre. Failing to provide competitive, high-quality customer service at every touchpoint can lead to low levels of customer satisfaction, which can have detrimental impacts on the business.

However, as contact centres increasingly turn towards digital solutions as part of their transformation journeys, contact centre managers now have access to vast amounts of data on consumer and agent behaviour, which can help inform strategies to increase customer satisfaction. Contact centres can uncover critical patterns, trends, behaviours, and anomalies affecting customer satisfaction by leveraging modern analytics tools and powerful AI-driven solutions.

Data is one of the most important tools to have in a contact centre toolkit. However, it's equally important to have powerful analytics capabilities available to help contact centre managers make sense of their data. The volume of data and the number of data sources required—including interactive voice response (IVR), agent notes, and omnichannel inquiries—are immense.

Without the support of dedicated AI-driven analytics tools, it can be challenging for contact centre agents and managers to derive valuable insights to inform their strategies. However, by combining analytics tools with strategies to improve customer satisfaction, contact centre managers can go a long way towards improving the customer experience and subsequently improving customer satisfaction.

There are two key areas where contact centre organisations should consider implementing AI-driven solutions to help improve customer satisfaction:

1.        Understand how sentiment indicates satisfaction

Customer sentiment during interactions is one of the most valuable indicators of customer satisfaction. To best understand the sentiment, contact centre managers must measure if customers have a positive, negative, or neutral interaction with agents, be they human or AI.

When contact centre managers can gather and analyse data around interactions and sentiments, they can better identify the sources of dissatisfaction where necessary, better understand specific issues, and uncover insights into addressing customer concerns.

This can be challenging to measure at scale. However, leveraging AI-driven solutions can help organisations better detect and understand customer sentiment and its impact on satisfaction, for example:

• specific words and phrases that indicate positive or negative sentiment
• which positive phrases, if any, offset negative interactions
• what tone is being used by customers and agents, and how it impacts sentiment
• if there is cross-talk in interactions and if it indicates positive or negative emotions.

Leveraging AI solutions to help break down this information lets contact centre managers and agents more quickly identify and act on customer satisfaction issues.

2.        Identify behaviours that facilitate quick improvements in customer satisfaction

Specific agent behaviours can directly impact customer satisfaction by determining if a caller has a positive or negative call interaction. Agent soft skills, such as how friendly an agent is on the call and whether they actively listen to customers, can have the biggest impact on interactions and customer satisfaction.

Unfortunately, soft skills like these can be subjective and difficult to define, often requiring hundreds or thousands of calls to be analysed, which can be expensive and time-consuming for contact centre employees to manage manually. However, when contact centres leverage AI-powered analytics solutions to conduct this analysis instead, they can remove the subjectivity of manual analysis and significantly reduce the time and costs involved.

AI-driven solutions can automatically score interactions to identify if and when agents use critical soft skills, identify where improvements can be made, and provide specific, objective insights for training.

It's essential for contact centres to invest in solutions that provide valuable insights into customer satisfaction. The data alone isn't enough if contact centre managers can't make sense of the information and derive actionable insights to inform strategies to improve customer satisfaction.

AI-driven analytics solutions can help contact centre managers leverage real-time insights from customer interactions and better understand what actions need to be taken to improve the customer experience and overall customer satisfaction.

Article by NICE ANZ managing director, Rod Lester.