CALL CENTER SENTIMENT ANALYSIS CASE STUDY
Reducing customer churn at a mobile carrier.
Mobile carriers are in a cut-throat industry. One carrier reached out to Repustate to re-invent their call center to prevent customers from switching to their competition.
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Call Center Sentiment Analysis
How can sentiment analysis turn call centers into customer insight superstars?
Call centers can often be your most important touchpoint for customer loyalty and retention. Call centers usually deal with present customer concerns and issues and are thus frequently overlooked as essential sources of customer and brand insights. The truth is call centers are as important to your company's customer success as are front line sales associates. In many industries such as retail, banking, and telecommunications, call centers are critical to on-going post-purchase success and support.
The conversations that occur through a call center are packed with vital intelligence that can help a company looking to improve customer experience through its pricing, products, service, etc. To discover, extract, and analyze these valuable insights at scale, you can use various automated tools such as sentiment analysis and opinion mining. These tools surface the most relevant and important information from text data that your organization can then use to formulate the strategic decisions needed to improve overall customer value delivery.
How are call centers important to Customer Experience?
Customer experience (CX) is a marketing term that refers to a customer's holistic view of a company's overall brand. It's based on their various encounters with the company across multiple points such as products, branches, online, mobile, and customer service. It is complex as each client has their own unique, dynamic experience resulting from multiple brand impressions as formed through first-hand encounters. One of the most important experiences a customer can have with your company is through your call centers.
Call centers are powerful because they allow your brand to connect with your present customers and collect essential conversations in the form of text transcripts about their customer experience and other interactions with your business. Whether customers choose to talk to you through phone calls, emails, or chatbots, these conversations can all be transcribed if needed. Further, using text analytics can be analyzed for opinions, sentiment, or extracting named entities. The insights extracted by text analytics are scored for the sentiment (+1 positive, to 0 neutral, to -1 negative) then grouped and classified by important topics, aspects, and/or entities.
The aim of gathering and analyzing information should always be to uncover insights, trends, and patterns in data. This data can help your company make more confident, data-driven strategic decisions to improve business through pinpointing areas that require a change to generate a more positive sentiment (love, joy, like, great, amazing, wow, etc.) and reduce negative feelings (hate, angry, upset, horrible, etc). Positive customer experience is an essential prerequisite for continued revenue growth and word-of-mouth promotion. You can easily establish a benchmark for customer experience and by using a sentiment analysis dashboard you can set and track your metrics and KPIs to measure progress.
What are the benefits of call center sentiment analysis?
There are five primary benefits of call center sentiment analysis:
- Drive greater sales by identifying up-sell and cross-sell opportunities to clients who express positive feelings and opinions.
- Improve products and services by analyzing negative call center feedback trending and making needed changes.
- Improve call center representative scripts and effectiveness by analyzing the sentiments associated with specific phrases.
- Understand what's working with customers by examining positive sentiment and emphasizing those features or aspects.
- Improve customer loyalty and reduce churn rate through more impactful call center techniques that create positivity and/or de-escalate negativity.
By conducting sentiment analysis through either a platform or API, will improve your call center effectiveness, provide business insights for strategic change, increase revenue, and drive overall ROI.
Call Center
Every business wishes they had 100% customer satisfaction. But in industries like wireless telecommunications, that's not the reality. Assuming you'll always have some segment of unhappy customers, can something be done to greatly reduce the churn rate of angry customers?
Seeing the future before it happens
A wireless carrier in Europe asked Repustate to help build a text analytics component to integrate with their call center software in order to track and analyze all interactions with customer service representatives (CSRs). The idea was to predict when a customer, after having a certain amount of negative interactions with the carrier, would decide to leave for the competition.
The new process would be as follows:
- The voice data of each call would be converted to text using speech-to-text software.
- This text is then sent to Repustate for sentiment analysis. Repustate analyzes each stored call for sentiment and semantic meaning, looking for mention of specific products and services. An overall customer sentiment score was tracked for each customer.
- At regular intervals, a separate process would query the customer database to see if any customers have sustained negative sentiment below a certain threshold. If the sentiment remained below a threshold for too long or the overall sentiment score for a customer was too low, a text message was sent to the customer apologizing for the recent problems and offering a special promotion e.g. a discount on next month's service.
- Subsequent phone calls by customers would display historical information on the CSR's screen which outlined the sentiment of past calls, the issues discussed (which were determined based on the sentiment analysis of each call) and prompted the CSR to offer promotions or to ask how the call center's service has been recently.
The results were impressive. The chart below shows the carrier's monthly churn rate compared to the industry standard.
Industry churn (%) Carrier churn (%)
Are you looking to incorporate sentiment analysis into your call center analytics? Like all of Repustate's products, our sentiment analysis and visualization dashboard are supported with a multilingual analysis approach in over 20 languages, including English, Spanish, French, and Arabic.