Category: Blogs

Surprise! For Healthy Personal and Business Relationships, Some of the Same Rules Apply   

Building any healthy long-term relationship—whether personal or business—requires commitment on both sides. That’s especially true for a relationship as important as when you partner with a business process outsourcing company (BPO) to outsource some or all of your customer experience (CX) operation. 

This is a mission-critical business relationship. It involves hundreds or thousands of customer service employees, personal customer data, compliance regulations, and your brand experience. It takes dedication and open communication from both sides to make this a strong relationship.

Good relationships are built on bonds of trust and shared values. Building those bonds with a BPO begins at the start of your buyer’s journey. 

That journey usually commences by researching different BPOs online and narrowing your choices. Then you meet a few of them virtually or in-person to get to know them. Over time as your journey progresses, you learn more than just their capabilities. You sense whether or not you’re meeting with a prospective partner that’s committed to a strong, positive relationship. 

After considerable due diligence you feel ready to choose a BPO. The two of you iron out the details in a contract that’s good for both of you, based on your shared interests and commitments. You’re feeling good about your chosen partner’s commitment to a relationship dedicated to your success. 

This is a major investment in a relationship that has potential to deliver great results.  And you have many reasons to be excited and hopeful, including: 

• Turning over the expensive and time-consuming duties of managing your CX operation to an expert organization. 
• Working with a qualified and well-trained staff. 
• Access to the latest digital CX technology.
• The ability to invest the money and time saved in other important projects. 
• Peace of mind that quality assurance, risk management, and compliance regulations are being followed. 

Sometimes a BPO Relationship Can Go So Well That You Begin to Wonder, “Can Our BPO Be The One?”  

Like all relationship questions, this one deserves an answer.

Is it as good as it seems? Use the seven signs below to be sure.

Sign 1: Right. On. Target.

The right BPO partner follows through on their word and their commitment to you.

The two of you agreed that specific key performance indicators (KPIs) would be reached at certain points over the term of the engagement. 

Now, you’re ecstatic because they keep hitting deadlines for the important metrics you identified, such as average speed of answer, first-call resolution, and more. 

Too good to be true? No, the data says you made a good choice. They do what they say they’re going to do and are proving they are a partner you can trust. 

Sign 2: Setting a Comfortable Pace

You don’t want to rush things, but you don’t want your relationship to be stuck in the same place forever either.

That’s how it is with CX technology, too. You don’t want to get ahead of your company’s needs, but you can’t afford to watch your competitors adopt technology that gives them an advantage.

You know your BPO is the one for you when they keep you informed about the latest CX technology that can save you even more time and money, while hitting all the KPIs. 

The digital transformation services your BPO offers address your specific needs to help you keep your promise to your customers. 

You know you’ve found a real catch when your BPO is also an authorized outsourced service provider (OSP) for several leading digital CX solution providers. So, in addition to their experience in those technologies, they might be able to offer you a better deal on some parts of your CX tech stack.

You’re moving forward at just the right pace. 

Sign 3: Always Listening 

Both sides need to communicate to maintain a healthy relationship. 

Your operations team boasts that your BPO is a great listener, and they have no problem communicating with each other. Here are a few examples:  

• Texts, emails, and phone calls are returned promptly.  
• Ask several people a question and they all have the same answer so you know everyone is aligned with the key objectives. When you connect, it’s not just about day-to-day matters. They always have time to discuss concerns you might have so they can work on them.  
• Quarterly reviews are on the calendar and run like clockwork. 
• Surveys are sent when input is needed on any aspect of the CX program to gain the insights needed to keep hitting all the KPIs. 
• Your BPO’s executive team is involved so you never feel removed from the big picture in the relationship.  

You went into the BPO due diligence process looking for a true partner, not just another vendor. It looks like you found one.  

Sign 4: Never Makes You Wait 

“I love waiting,” said no one ever.

Fortunately, your BPO partner never makes you wait.

The two of you set goals for how quickly they’d scale their staff to the number of agents required to support your program. They hit the three-month mark, the six-month mark, and the 12-month mark. 

Even more gratifying, their agents are as qualified as they promised.

Sign 5: Stays Focused on What’s Real 

The near-term and the long-term have a healthy balance of planning.

Your BPO has a good handle on where you should be in 90 days as well as in a year or two, and they have the solutions to reach those goals. But they maintain focus on the current environment as well and when your operations team needs their help, they commit to resolving the issues of the day.

You understand it’s a new relationship and there are bound to be some adjustments needed along the way. Your BPO partner works diligently with your operations team day-in and day-out to ensure that your program stays on track to hit all your KPIs. 

They understand that you’re not ready to start a conversation about another CX program until you have a business case for it. 

Since you both operate “in the present,” you can work through things that pop up knowing that your partner is totally committed to your success.

Sign 6: Responsible and Responsive

In a strong relationship, when you ask your partner a question you expect an honest answer.

When your partner is the BPO you chose to run your CX program, that answer might be critical to your business.

You don’t need an answer that leaves you wondering if they understood the question.

The fact that your BPO always responds fully and clearly to your questions makes your life a lot easier. And when they don’t know the answer at that exact moment and tell you they need some time to find the answer, you’re confident that you’ll hear from them soon, and you do.

Sign 7: They’re Focused on What Matters Most

Trust, open communication, and commitment are important aspects of any relationship.

When you outsource customer service, you’re looking for a partner that will focus on the things that matter most. Creating rewarding experiences for your customers while leveraging the latest CX technology for operational efficiency and offering you multiple choices in geographic support can help you reach your goals. Your BPO partner must create customer experiences that make your customers feel recognized and understood.

When customers contact your customer service, regardless of the channel they’re using, they want and expect everyone they encounter to know their name, to care about their issue, and to help them resolve it promptly. 

When your BPO makes that happen, it opens a world of opportunities to improve:  

1. Customer satisfaction. 

2. Customer loyalty.  

3. Share of wallet.  

4. Word-of-mouth referrals. 

It all starts when the CX your BPO delivers creates smiles for your customers.

Is Your BPO the One?

Now that you know the signs that your BPO is the one for you, how is your current BPO doing? 

A relationship based on trust, with a commitment to your success, forms the foundation of a successful outsourced customer experience that delivers on your KPIs and improves your bottom line.

If you’re looking to outsource a CX program to a BPO, consider these seven signs to help determine which BPO is the one for you. 

Experience the iQor Difference

iQor’s omnichannel support experience helps brands connect with customers on their terms. Our CX experts partner with brands to design intelligent channel optimization strategies to ensure they align with customer needs. From AI-powered agents to in-app messaging, iQor’s experience makes us a trusted partner in CX.

iQor is ideally suited to help brands create amazing customer experiences. iQor provides a comprehensive suite of full-service and self-service scalable offerings that are purpose-built to deliver enterprise-quality CX.

Our award-winning CX services include:  

• A global presence with 40+ contact centers across 10 countries.  
• A CX private cloud that maximizes performance and scales rapidly across multiple geographies on short notice.  
• A partnership approach where we deploy agents and C-level executives to help maximize your ROI.
• The perfect blend of intelligent automation for scale and performance coupled with an irresistible culture comprised of people who love to delight your customers.  
• Virtual and hybrid customer support options to connect with customers seamlessly, when and where they want.  
• The ability to launch a customer support program quickly, even when you need thousands of agents ready to support your customers.  
• A best-in-class workforce management team and supporting technology to create a centralized organization that can better serve your entire business. 

iQor helps brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? If you’re ready to start a conversation with a customer experience expert, contact us to learn about how we can help you create more smiles.

Discover How a Digital BPO Provides Access to Natural Language Speech Analytics Used to Enhance the Customer Experience

The modern customer experience includes digital technology with channels like email, chatbots, social media, intelligent voice response, and more.

By making all the technology within a digital ecosystem accessible and intuitive, we can empower staff to blend human and digital elements to create amazing customer experiences. As a managed services provider of customer engagement and technology-enabled BPO solutions, iQor knows that technology must offer robust capabilities within a framework that is easy to use by customers in need of support as well as by frontline contact center employees delivering that support.

In this blog post, we reveal how a powerful and easily accessible search language puts seemingly infinite capabilities of speech analytics into the hands of frontline managers. We look at how a straightforward search language enables supervisors to analyze specific details of interest from any recorded customer interaction (voice or text) at a moment’s notice. A simple and direct query language known as T-DSL (Topic-Domain-Specific Language), explained further below, empowers them to create the search parameters themselves without involving technical staff to gain valuable insight into the customer’s experience.

This capability gives unlimited access to the information operations teams need to drill down into the details of customer interactions in no time. It can yield powerful insights that help brands better understand their customers’ experiences and help customer service teams address opportunities to improve touchpoints throughout the customer journey.

Easy Access to Speech Analytics

Speech analytics is an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered digital technology that mines human speech and text from recorded contact center interactions to reveal actionable data that helps create smiles throughout the customer experience journey. Interaction analytics is part of a comprehensive digital transformation strategy to garner customer experience insights using advanced data analytics.

At iQor, we deploy a proprietary speech analytics platform called VALDI, that uses cloud computing and artificial intelligence (especially machine learning and natural language processing) to analyze 100% of the recorded interactions between agents and the customers they support.

A digital ecosystem that includes a robust speech analytics platform such as this gives insights into the voice of your customer to help improve the overall customer experience. In doing so, we collect business intelligence that can be harnessed to make decisions to positively impact your business.

But in order for speech analytics to be effective, it must be accessible to those who are closest to your customers. Performing any type of query has to be quick and simple and needs to produce useful data that can be easily interpreted to inform actions.

5 Benefits of Customized Searches in Speech Analytics

Speech analytics technology can be used to search voice and text recordings of customer interactions for specific content based on your brand’s needs. This includes analytics on a range of topics such as script adherence, the introduction of new product lines, and the effectiveness of support during natural disasters. Utilizing speech analytics with a powerful query language to search all recorded interactions within seconds enables operations teams to drill down into any topic of interest because they don’t need to identify keywords and topics in advance. This also yields tremendous results for quality assurance and risk mitigation.

One way to accomplish this is through customizable keyword-based queries that tag customer interactions related to the topic and prompt more data analysis.

Through a simple and direct user interface based on clean UX design, operations supervisors can perform searches by keywords and natural-language data filters in response to changing needs.

This capability to home in on specific opportunities through speech analytics empowers program supervisors and leaders to make adjustments that can quickly improve the customer experience, from coaching agents on particular areas of need to adjusting scripts and updating training protocols. The results offer brands actionable insight into the customer journey at any given time to ensure optimal customer experiences.

What follows are five benefits of the powerful search language in our VALDI speech analytics platform.

1. Enable Simple and Complex Searches in Seconds

Keeping UX at the forefront, iQor teams developed a powerful query language to improve analytical capabilities and more accurately identify specific events in customer interactions. With no expert knowledge required, the language equips customer service operations teams with the ability to perform any type of analysis at a moment’s notice. From words spoken to the context in which they were said, the search language can understand a multitude of search parameters all with the ability to filter out unnecessary details so operations teams can quickly find the specific conversation details they need.

The 60,000+ searches conducted at iQor each month across customer care programs extend beyond general topics in voice or text and include sentiment analysis, and other topics that illuminate all aspects of the customer experience.

The straightforward yet powerful T-DSL (Topic-Domain-Specific Language) that iQor developers created addresses the need to narrow speech analytics searches by domain (voice or text) in a way that customer service supervisors can manage without needing programming skills.

This is a unique and specially designed capability that improves upon previous speech analytics processes that required special programming knowledge to develop and test search queries.

The simple and accessible T-DSL search language puts power in the hands of frontline managers so they can search customer interactions very quickly in myriad ways. This is a unique benefit of iQor’s VALDI speech analytics platform compared to commercial off-the-shelf tools that aren’t easily customizable or searchable without intervention by technical staff and additional cost.

These analytical capabilities also enable quality assurance. For example, it’s easy to verify if customer service agents are following a script by checking to make sure they resolved all of the customer’s issues before ending the call. The operations team can simply search: LAST 30: “Anything else I can help you with” to make sure the representative ended the call correctly and the customer was satisfied.

2. Identify the Context Behind the Words

Before the T-DSL intuitive search language, it was easy to discover what was said during an interaction between a customer and a customer service representative. It was challenging, however, to identify the metadata behind what was said—to identify who said it, when they said it, and check the sentiment and emotion behind what they said. All this data around the words that are actually spoken provide important details that help supervisors understand what was happening on the call with this customer.

Access to metadata like this would previously involve writing complicated queries that are inaccessible to average users who aren’t data scientists. Now, with T-DSL, the average operations user can not only perform intuitive searches themselves, but they can also save their searches as bookmarks and share them with other users to help them perform the same search at any time. Users can also search each utterance on a call separately to gain further insights into the metadata and better understand the customer and employee experience.

3. Use the Search Function With Ease

An intuitive and flexible user experience is important for ensuring frontline operations managers can efficiently use the search functionality of speech analytics to gain valuable insight into the customer experience. This need guided the digital CX team at iQor as they created the T-DSL UX and also led them to create intuitive directions, clear examples, and videos modeling how to use the search function. By educating contact center users on the capabilities of the speech analytics platform and the intuitive nature of how to use this search function, frontline managers can perform simple and complex searches based on their varying needs.

4. Sort Interactions by Speaker: Customer or Agent

According to operations teams, one of the most useful functionalities of the intuitive and customizable T-DSL search language is the ability to divide sentences according to words spoken by the customer and words spoken by the customer service representative across any industry, whether banking, telecom, retail, or another. Because agents often repeat words spoken by customers in order to confirm the accuracy of their request, the searches now enable operations users to specify whose word utterances they want to analyze (e.g., customer or agent) so they can identify accurate results.

For example, if you want to verify customer satisfaction, operations teams can search for specific phrases that express positive customer sentiment. Previously, such searches were not precise enough because they also identified phrases spoken by agents. Now it is possible to limit the results to customer expressions as so: CLIENT: “I appreciate that” | “Thank you kindly” | “That’s awesome”. (Note: in T-DSL “client” refers to the end customer.)

This functionality is also helpful at the launch of a new promotion or program when you want to know how many customers are calling to ask about it. With the ability to limit search results to only those that occurred at the beginning of the call and were spoken by the customer, operations teams can easily and quickly provide that information by creating a simple search such as: FIRST 30: CLIENT: [promotion name].

Similarly, if you’re looking to increase sales and want to verify that customer care agents are asking customers whether they want anything else from your catalogue towards the end of the call, operations teams can simply search: LAST 180: AGENT: “Would you like to order anything else”.

The search language also enables users to see how many times the word or phrase was uttered by the customer and how many times the agent said it.

5. Search for Dependent Phrases Concurrently

iQor’s speech analytics search language also enables operations staff to identify multiple sequential phrases within the same search, making it possible to find answers to questions posed during the customer interaction. For example, operations users can set up a search to find customers who indicate they don’t use a brand’s mobile app simply by typing: PRECEDE: “Do you use our mobile app” FOLLOW: “No”.

Client Example: T-DSL Provides Targeted Business Insights in Retail Industry

To better understand the advantages of an accessible T-DSL, here’s one example of the direct benefits the straightforward search language provides to a client in the retail industry.

Through ongoing open communication with iQor operations leaders, the online retail company can specify targeted T-DSL searches they want the operations analysts to perform to provide specific insights into different areas of their business and customer behaviors. Likewise, as a trusted partner that knows the retailer’s priorities, the iQor team can also proactively search topics that may be of interest to the client.

For example, a new state mandate required shipping charges for purchases sent to Colorado (the client was previously able to offer free shipping to this location). To provide the best customer experience, the online retail client needed to know how often customers inquired and insisted for free shipping to Colorado. In response, an iQor operations analyst created a T-DSL query to search all calls where customers asked for free shipping to Colorado with this definition: Colorado + “free shipping”.

The query identified 16 calls out of a call volume of approximately 10,000 recordings in VALDI. After performing their analysis, the operations team confirmed that agents were compliant with their services and script adherence.

Operations shared their speech analysis findings with the online retail client who appreciated the insight that allowed them to learn if customers were requesting free shipping to Colorado. In fact, the client asked the operations team to regularly monitor calls on this topic—which is simple with the use of a saved T-DSL query, especially given that all search criteria may be preserved as a bookmark and shared with other members of the operations team.

As a result of these insights, the client updated their policy so agents can apply additional discounts to purchases made by customers shipping to Colorado, saving customers the same amount as shipping costs and enhancing the customer experience. The T-DSL query has since been updated to not only detect Colorado + “free shipping” but also IF the agent is remembering to offer the appropriate brand discount to avoid losing a sale.

“We are very satisfied with VALDI, particularly the T-DSL tool because it’s user-friendly, efficient, and effective in helping us meet the needs of the operations team, the client, and most importantly, the customers.” – iQor Quality Analyst and VALDI User

A Unified Language Makes Speech Analytics Simple

A unified and straightforward query language with a clean UX design for operations managers to search any recorded details from contacts with customers—whether calls, transcriptions, and, in the future, even chats and emails—makes it possible to identify information of interest within milliseconds. This empowers frontline supervisors with the information they need to coach agents in meaningful ways so they can create smiles throughout the customer experience. It also provides insights that improve quality assurance, reduce risk, and give brands like yours a better-informed look into the customer journey.

Experience the Best in Speech Analytics

iQor’s proprietary speech analytics platform uses a combination of cloud computing and artificial intelligence (especially machine learning and natural language processing) to extract every customer interaction for actionable data insights delivered as a custom solution with outsourced CX services.

iQor is ideally suited to help brands create amazing customer experiences. iQor provides a comprehensive suite of full-service and self-service scalable offerings that are purpose-built to deliver enterprise-quality CX.

Our award-winning CX services include:

• A global presence with 40+ contact centers across 10 countries.
• A CX private cloud that maximizes performance and scales rapidly across multiple geographies on short notice.
• A partnership approach where we deploy agents and C-level executives to help maximize your ROI.
• The perfect blend of intelligent automation for scale and performance coupled with an irresistible culture comprised of people who love to delight your customers.
• Virtual and hybrid customer support options to connect with customers seamlessly, when and where they want.
• The ability to launch a customer support program quickly, even when you need thousands of agents ready to support your customers.
• A best-in-class workforce management team and supporting technology to create a centralized organization that can better serve your entire business.

iQor helps brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? If you’re ready to start a conversation with a customer experience expert, contact us to learn about how we can help you create more smiles.

Olga Rycek is manager of information services at iQor.

Monika Starczewska is director of analytics at iQor.

Maciej Malesinski is senior manager of IT at iQor.

Irena Michalewicz is manager of information services at iQor.

They are part of the VALDI speech analytics team.

Building Brand Loyalty Through a Customer-Centric Company Culture

A strong customer service culture lies at the heart of many successful brands. But it can sometimes be challenging to maintain an enduring customer-centric focus as companies expand and diversify. Keeping a values-based customer service culture, even in the midst of growth, is essential because regardless of how stellar a product or service is, if customers are not able to receive effective support easily and quickly, their opinion of the product and, more importantly, of your brand may be at risk.

In this post, we explore what a customer service culture is, who creates it, and how to cultivate it to create rewarding experiences and satisfied customers.

Driving Excellent CX Through a Customer Service Culture

As customers undergo their own digital transformation, they have high expectations of the brands whose products and services they consume. In fact, 72% of consumers expect brands to have knowledge of their previous engagements. When a consumer is asked to explain their problem to multiple people when seeking support, they are disappointed. After just one bad experience, many consumers will abandon a brand or speak negatively about their experience with other consumers.  

More than half of all enterprises outsource their customer service to third-party business process outsourcing (BPO) partners like iQor. In order to provide customers the quality service they deserve, it’s critical to ensure that the entire customer service team and frontline staff responsible for delivering customer service are plugged into the culture of the brand they serve.

At iQor, customer service culture is in our DNA. Creating an exceptional customer experience is the minimum bar we set for the brands we support, no matter the industry. This culture permeates interactions at all levels to provide positive experiences for employees and customers alike.

What Is a Customer Service Culture?

A customer service culture is defined by a unified focus on the customer across the entire business.

Though a customer-centric focus is essential for those with positions in customer service, marketing, sales, and product creation, it is beneficial for all departments within a company to be customer-driven. In other words, in this culture the entire company is customer-driven, even employees in departments that seemingly don’t engage directly with customers. Think of it as a universal “customer first” culture. 

In this culture, even staff in departments such as accounting, which is commonly viewed as unrelated to customer engagement, come to the realization that every department exists to either help win a new customer or keep and support existing customers. Consider the people in accounting who pay suppliers’ invoices. The parts (or services) purchased from suppliers are used to build your brand’s products. Treating suppliers like customers is a healthy mindset when it’s understood that without suppliers, you can’t make the products you sell to your customers.

By infusing a customer-centric mindset into your enterprise’s core values, vision, and mission, you lay the foundation to build a customer-focused culture across the entire business. Rather than wondering how each department is connected to the customer, this mindset empowers everyone to connect those dots easily. Research and development will focus on building products and services that solve customers’ challenges. Sales and marketing will communicate your brand’s value proposition clearly to current and prospective customers. And your leadership will always ensure that you have the appropriate customer support resources in place—whether in-house or outsourced—so that when your customers have questions or problems, the support they receive will be exceptional and they’ll want to tell others about it. This deepens employee engagement and customer loyalty. In this way, an entire corporate culture is a customer-centric culture.

The culture of your organization is two-fold. It is supported by your company’s stated values and beliefs, while also developing naturally through the attitudes and behaviors that result from business policies, decisions, and practices. 

6 Key Elements of a Great Customer Service Culture

Customer service culture should be rooted in your mission, but having all the right pieces in place doesn’t happen automatically. Moreover, it doesn’t happen solely because it’s written in your mission statement; it evolves from a true commitment to customer service and the related attitudes and behaviors that permeate your organization. Some key elements are crucial to making your company culture a customer-centric one.

1. Consistent Training and Coaching to Improve Customer Service

Businesses developing an in-house customer support strategy should know what we know in the business process outsourcing industry: that training and career development play a pivotal role in building a culture that prioritizes customers along every step of their journey.

From recruiting to onboarding to training and nesting, new employees must be engaged in training that not only solidifies their product and program knowledge, but also builds their soft skills embedded in the company’s mission, vision, and values so they become a part of the customer-centric company DNA.

This training and coaching should be ongoing and a part of the lived experiences and behaviors throughout the organization. Company-wide training and re-training add to the employee experience as they deepen their commitment to the customer-centric culture and support your brand’s commitment to providing great customer service. 

2. Empowerment to Take Initiatives

Frontline staff responsible for handling customer questions and solving problems can deliver a better customer experience when they are empowered to help customers. 

Customer service representatives are equipped with well-developed scripts to guide their answers to a wide variety of questions and provide a consistent level of service and expertise. A customer-centric culture, however, also empowers employees to resolve customer issues and address their pain points in ways that make sense for each situation.

This empowerment is facilitated by intelligent automation that can help guide agents while they are servicing customers, removing some of the burdens placed on them when handling complex questions. This reinforces your company’s commitment to entrusting frontline staff to resolve customer questions and contributes to retention. This is further enhanced by speech analytics which not only facilitates compliance monitoring but also provides insight into the customer and employee experience to inform script modifications as well as training and coaching so agents have the skills and resources they need to meet customer needs.

Customers assuredly prefer communicating with brand representatives who show empathy for their situation and demonstrate a willingness to resolve it. The customer will be frustrated if the customer service representative reads the same scripted response they’ve heard before while their problem remains unresolved. Your customer service representatives should show empathy, making a human connection with each customer to create a memorable customer experience that will leave a lasting positive impression and build loyalty to your brand. 

3. Common Language

While some scripted customer conversations are warranted to enable customer support delivery at scale, it’s important to instill a culture of using common language to facilitate human connections with your customer. Such common language details should be covered in training and re-training exercises.

For instance, a strong customer service culture can underpin the delivery of empathetic customer support in healthcare. If a patient asks questions about their deductible or copay, it’s important that the customer service representative uses common language that aligns with the customer-centric culture. Training and re-training should ensure the representative can show a patient-first approach through active listening, empathy, and a clear understanding of the program to differentiate between copays and deductibles and resolve the patient’s issue effectively. When this shared language is part of the company culture, it promotes consistent and rewarding experiences with the brand.

Common language should be delivered consistently internally as well as being included in presentations, internal emails, newsletters, internal documents, etc. Such communication should use specific terms and phrases that are commonly used to describe your products and services. Indeed, a customer service culture should be part of your brand voice.

All customer-facing communication should follow suit as well so that customers visiting your website or social media posts will recognize the same language, voice, and approach that they receive when interacting with your customer support specialists. 

4. Leadership by Example

Examples of excellent customer service experiences should be everyday occurrences in your business when there is a company-wide customer-centric culture. Enterprises looking to partner with a business process outsourcing solution provider like iQor should conduct a thorough examination of the BPO’s customer-centric culture as part of the overall assessment. BPO CX services should extend beyond just training agents about your brand’s products to also include training and development about your brand’s culture in order to serve as an authentic representation of your brand’s culture and voice to your customer.

The way to lead by example is to observe the culture of the BPO. Is the BPO a living, breathing example of being customer-centric? How do they interact with you? What do their training programs look like? Do they boost retention and support the company culture through clear career paths that provide growth and opportunity for agents and supervisors?

5. Humility and Respect

Great customer service is rooted in respect and informed by humility. When a customer has a problem, they want to be heard and supported with empathy. Customer service employees should be empowered to listen well and trained to seek to understand the customer before jumping in to try to solve a problem they may not fully comprehend yet.

Processes that allow flexibility with the time needed to complete a support request, for example, leave space for the customer to vent so the support agent is empowered to help that customer feel cared for in that situation. This increases first-call resolution rates and promotes customer satisfaction through human connections. Training that teaches active listening skills and empathy sets support specialists up for success in a customer-centric culture. 

6. Balance Between Technology and Humanity

Automation and omnichannel customer support are on the rise, which is fantastic for you and your customers when human connections remain at the center. Recent research shows that 69% of customers are satisfied with their chatbot experiences.

Still, customers expect a balance between technology- and human-based customer service. Some customers strongly prefer access to an agent via phone to speak with a live representative. Others may prefer the ease and convenience of SMS-based texting. But most customers can tell the difference between a live chat with a real person and a programmed chat.

It’s crucial to know when it is practical and effective to offer chatbot support for requests such as password reset or account balance and knowing when to connect your customers with a human representative either through live chat or a voice line. When offering a digital menu of options to the customer, the choices should provide options that address the most common scenarios through a balance of technology and the human touch. And they should include an intuitive option to seamlessly switch to live support at any point in the customer journey.

This is why iQor named our podcast “Digitally Irresistible” to showcase experts with a mix of CX technology and human interaction know-how. A successful customer-centric support program finds the right blend of CX technology while prioritizing efficiency and maintaining the human touch that creates smiles.

Benefits of a Customer-Centric Company Culture

A customer service culture across the entire company benefits more than the customer service team. When the customers’ needs and interests are embedded in your culture, the entire brand benefits. Your business will strengthen brand loyalty, stand out from the competition, and win more customers. It will meet customer expectations and create a great customer experience.

The impact of excellent customer support services on your business can be very consequential. Loyal customers take customer service seriously and base their decision to continue purchasing from your brand on that. Over 81% of consumers have reported that a positive customer experience improves the chances of making another purchase from the same business. 

Customers with good customer service experiences are likely to return and recommend you to others. As Shep Hyken says in his book, “I’ll Be Back”, “A great experience gets customers to return again and again.”

Exceptional customer service is an opportunity for enterprises to set themselves apart from the competition. Customers value great service, and they are more likely to shift from a competitor to your brand when they experience excellent service. High-quality customer service can be the reason a customer moves to your brand or stays with your brand, both of which are of high value to your business. 

A True Customer Service Culture Enhances CX

When customer service is truly part of your company’s culture, you can ensure that the customer always comes first, no matter what. Whether it’s executives making big decisions, frontline representatives speaking with customers, or developers designing the digital experience, each stakeholder must prioritize the customer, making business decisions that serve their interests and needs. A satisfied customer is a happy customer and that builds loyalty.

Whether your company delivers customer service in-house or chooses to partner with a BPO provider like iQor to manage cost-effective high-quality customer service, a customer-centric culture is foundational to creating smiles with your employees and with your customers.  

Experience the Best in Customer Service

iQor is ideally suited to help brands create amazing customer experiences. iQor provides a comprehensive suite of full-service and self-service scalable offerings that are purpose-built to deliver enterprise-quality CX.

Our award-winning CX services include:

• A global presence with 40+ contact centers across 10 countries.
• A CX private cloud that maximizes performance and scales rapidly across multiple geographies on short notice.
• A partnership approach where we deploy agents and C-level executives to help maximize your ROI.
• The perfect blend of intelligent automation for scale and performance coupled with an irresistible culture comprised of people who love to delight your customers.
• Virtual and hybrid customer support options to connect with customers seamlessly, when and where they want.
• The ability to launch a customer support program quickly, even when you need thousands of agents ready to support your customers.
• A best-in-class workforce management team and supporting technology to create a centralized organization that can better serve your entire business.

iQor helps brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? If you’re ready to start a conversation with a customer experience expert, contact us to learn about how we can help you create more smiles.

James McClenahan is executive vice president and chief sales officer at iQor.

How Analytics as a Service Unlocks Insights to Reduce Attrition, Boost Retention, and Elevate CX

Ongoing advances in big data and artificial intelligence (AI) provide countless insights and opportunities to improve the customer experience. One such capability is the use of machine learning to predict employee attrition. By collecting and analyzing data to identify employees at risk of attrition, data scientists can identify opportunities to intervene and reduce employee churn. These insights provided through analytics as a service can empower operations and human resources teams to develop strategies that raise employee engagement and retain key talent, ultimately improving business outcomes and creating a more rewarding employee and customer experience.

In this blog post, we’ll dive into the data sources and processes that make this possible along with the insights and outcomes they produce. But before we do so, let’s revisit what analytics as a service is and why it’s so valuable.

What Is Analytics as a Service?

Data-driven innovation happens when data scientists are integrated into the business culture and processes. Through analytics as a service, data scientists offer guidance and expertise to improve business outcomes that can measurably support our client’s customer support programs. A digital transformation strategy that includes analytics as a service provides access to massive amounts of data which the data scientists and operations teams dissect in order to harness its potential.

As a managed services provider of customer engagement and technology-enabled business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions, iQor offers analytics as a service as part of our comprehensive CX solutions to some of the world’s top brands. Through iQor’s vast digital ecosystem, we harness advances in AI-powered technology along with the expertise of our data scientists and operations teams to perform data analytics that yields measurable outcomes to improve employee and customer experiences at scale.

Data-based digital technology solutions have the power to drive meaningful results specific to the operating environment. iQor’s data scientists interpret the data housed in our private CX cloud to translate technical research and statistics into actionable insights that inform operational decisions and improve business outcomes. The 10-steps of analytics as a service typically start small and gradually expand to incorporate the entire customer service program. One of the many areas in which they provide insight is employee attrition and retention.

The Process of Predicting Attrition

The ability to predict and prevent employee attrition presents opportunities for success in customer service. Retaining qualified, experienced, and high-performing customer-care agents and supervisors can make a world of difference in the quality and consistency of service provided to the end customer.

Accessing data through analytics as a service to provide insight into the causes of attrition can provide invaluable information to inform interventions that can increase retention and ultimately minimize employee churn.

Data scientists begin by introducing new data sources to the machine learning model to identify agents at risk of leaving the company. In order to do so, they follow a formal process for identifying and validating potential data sources, gathering the data, and cleansing it. This enables them to generate new variables out of the data sources and then run variable-importance testing that compares the predictive power of every potential variable. If the predictive power exceeds the threshold, it’s included in the machine learning model to yield insights into attrition.

This is an ongoing process by which data scientists continue to explore additional data sources to add to the model in order to make it as accurate as possible for the entire company population.

Expanding the Data to Power Predictions

In order for predictive analytics to accurately forecast attrition, the projections must originate from more than one data source. This helps ensure a balanced view of each employee’s experience and accounts for a lack of data points for certain employees.

For example, iQor gathers data from weekly Mood-o-Meter surveys that employees have the option of completing. The survey gauges their job satisfaction and generates a net happiness score that provides helpful insights into their experiences. However, if certain agents never respond to the optional survey it cannot serve as a data source for deciphering whether those agents are at risk of attrition.

To offset this type of feedback-driven source, data scientists cast a wide net and include additional data sources based on each agent’s environment to help assess how they interact with iQor. These environmental data sources include how much time the agent spends logged in to work, participating in trainings, and taking a break. They also include the agent’s total pay, bonus history, and the complexity of the customer support program on which they work. Coaching interactions serve as another source for deriving environmental data. When an agent participates in the iQor Coaching ecosystem, data scientists are able to harvest this critical data from internal systems versus needing to seek a direct response.

Together, these data sources provide a more comprehensive view of the agent experience to determine if they are at risk of churning.

Analytics as a Service Yields Up to 2X Retention Rate for At-Risk Agents

Analytics as a service yields powerful results in reducing employee attrition.

Over the past year, the insights provided by iQor’s data scientists led to employee retention strategies that have helped retain more than 1,000 customer service agents.

iQor’s Machine Learning algorithm correctly identifies agents at the highest risk of attrition on a weekly basis. This is evidenced by the difference in attrition rates between the control group (a 5% sample of at-risk agents who do not receive an intervention) and the experimental group (those receiving an intervention). The experimental group retention rate is consistently up to 2 times higher than the control group retention rate.

By improving retention, these data-based interventions have increased the overall tenure makeup of the enterprise, ultimately leading to enhanced performance. Indeed, when deployed enterprise-wide, these attrition prevention methods can have a positive impact on employee engagement and improve business outcomes on a large scale. This benefits the client’s customer support program while also instilling confidence in agents and supervisors, which can lead to improved recruiting efforts. Furthermore, the iterative nature of the process allows for ongoing opportunities to add data sources and improve the model to produce increasingly valuable results.

Experience the Best in Data Analytics

iQor’s analytics as a service offering uses a combination of iQor’s proprietary speech analytics platform, cloud computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data analysis to develop custom interventions for identified areas in need of improvement along the customer journey. The results produce targeted improvements for the employee, customer, and client.

iQor is ideally suited to help brands create amazing customer experiences. iQor provides a comprehensive suite of full-service and self-service scalable offerings that are purpose-built to deliver enterprise-quality CX.

Our award-winning CX services include:

• A global presence with 40+ contact centers across 10 countries.
• A CX private cloud that maximizes performance and scales rapidly across multiple geographies on short notice.
• A partnership approach where we deploy agents and C-level executives to help maximize your ROI.
• The perfect blend of intelligent automation for scale and performance coupled with an irresistible culture comprised of people who love to delight your customers.
• Virtual and hybrid customer support options to connect with customers seamlessly, when and where they want.
• The ability to launch a customer support program quickly, even when you need thousands of agents ready to support your customers.
• A best-in-class workforce management team and supporting technology to create a centralized organization that can better serve your entire business.

iQor helps brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? If you’re ready to start a conversation with a customer experience expert, contact us to learn about how we can help you create more smiles.

Andrew Reilly is a data scientist on the AI & Data Science Team at iQor.

Omnichannel Customer Support Helps You Forge Better Customer Relationships and Stand Out in Your Industry

Omnichannel marketing and customer support aim to create a harmonious customer experience. Indeed, both approaches strengthen cross-channel customer relationships. While omnichannel marketing seeks to support customers pre-sale, omnichannel customer support focuses on post-sale experiences. In this blog post, we focus on the most important benefit of omnichannel customer support: building relationships with customers.

Today’s digital landscape has perpetuated the expectation for fast, responsive, and convenient service. This has resulted in an increasing demand for omnichannel customer service—a key element in building strong customer relationships.

4 Key Benefits of Building Relationships With Customers Through Omnichannel Support

The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically shifted customer trends, prompting customers to expect greater convenience and control over their purchasing decisions.

Instead of communicating with brands through a single channel, customers prefer an integrated and holistic experience across several channels.

Research shows that 86% of customers expect a company to recognize them when they switch between channels. To the customer and to the brand, the benefit that matters most in omnichannel customer support is relationship building.

A Harvard Business Review study reports that by providing a seamless customer experience through several digital channels, companies can gain an advantage over competitors. Additionally, the study reveals that omnichannel customers enjoy interacting with a brand’s touchpoints through a variety of channels.

These omnichannel customer service options include live chats (via chatbots and customer service representatives), phone calls, in-app SMS messaging, social media, emails, and text messages, to name a few.

Good customer support is an integral part of a successful customer experience. It builds loyalty and helps customers attain their desired outcomes. As a result, excellent customer experiences have the power to expand a brand’s customer base and build a positive reputation and increased loyalty.

iQor, a managed services provider of customer engagement and technology-enabled business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions, helps the world’s top brands design intelligent optimization strategies to ensure their channels are perfectly aligned with customer needs. Whether artificial intelligence (AI)-powered digital agents with a human feel or in-app messaging, iQor’s omnichannel experience helps brands build lasting relationships with customers.

What follows are some key benefits of an omnichannel approach to customer support in building rewarding customer relationships. 

Increased Customer Retention 

Good customer service opens a gateway to convert buyers into repeat customers. Omnichannel support that is part of a larger digital transformation strategy uses customer relationship management software and artificial intelligence tools to merge offline and online customer experiences. It allows for a more tailored customer experience, reducing churn and improving customer retention.

What’s more, good omnichannel support provides the capability to promptly respond to customer complaints regardless of the channels they use—from voice to chat to social media. Simply providing a response to customer concerns dramatically improves customer satisfaction.

Optimized Agent Interactions

Seamless omnichannel integration provides a connected customer experience across multiple different channels. With the help of intelligent automation, mundane tasks can be addressed through omnichannel support channels while simultaneously freeing up time for live customer service agents to focus on more complex interactions.

This capability can improve myriad metrics such as average handle time (AHT) and first call resolution, making for a better customer experience and a better agent experience. Further, omnichannel offerings provide agents the opportunity to interact with customers through digital channels instead of just voice—making for a better employee experience for those who prefer digital channels.

When customers have queries about a brand’s products or services, they expect an expedited response—regardless of the channel used. They might want to connect by voice with a live customer service representative at a contact center or turn to social media for an immediate reply. Some customers may prefer live chat.

It’s imperative that all touchpoints work together seamlessly to guide customers in a single direction. An experienced digital BPO partner like iQor can create a smooth omnichannel customer experience that creates efficiencies across all service channels.

Improved Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction depends heavily on the quality of customer support with 93% of customers likely to repeat purchases with brands that offer excellent customer service. And the relationship extends beyond simply the product purchase itself. Some customers follow up with queries about product usage or comments about their purchasing experience. An effective omnichannel customer engagement strategy makes their journey easier and ensures a connected and intuitive experience that generates smiles across channels. 

Expanded Customer Access and Engagement

Lastly, omnichannel customer support builds customer relationships by understanding and offering customer-preferred channels. By understanding the channels that customers are more likely to use, customer support can be structured accordingly to improve access and ensure fast response times. By providing excellent support that is consistent and streamlined across multiple channels, customers can enjoy a personalized experience that makes them feel valued and reinforces their brand loyalty.

Lifetime Value of Customer Relationships Increases With Omnichannel Support

Customer lifetime value is a key indicator for understanding customers. It predicts the value that a customer relationship can bring to any business. Customer lifetime value data helps businesses decide which resources to invest in to win new customers and retain existing ones. Not surprisingly, the integrated customer experience generated by seamless and responsive omnichannel support increases a customer’s lifetime value.

Lifetime Value and Its Impact on Businesses

Monitoring customer lifetime value provides insight into the health of a business, ensuring that existing acquisition and retention tactics contribute to business growth. If lifetime value trends show troubling performance, adjustments can be made to improve the bottom line.

• Customer lifetime value can be calculated to better understand customer retention. According to 81% of marketers, monitoring customer lifetime value over time strengthens customer relationships and boosts sales.

• This value helps brands determine how much to invest in retaining customers and helps define marketing strategies, build customer loyalty, and improve retention.

• Customer lifetime value informs how brands manage customer relations, increasing overall profitability. 

Omnichannel customer service fulfills various customer preferences by allowing engagement in their preferred channel. BPOs like iQor gather business intelligence data to provide insight into which channels to offer, meeting customer expectations and improving customer interactions to create excellent CX that strengthens customer relationships and elevates the brand.

Calculating Lifetime Value of Customers 

There are several formulas for calculating customer lifetime value; the main goal is to choose one and stick to it. The traditional formula for calculating customer lifetime value multiplies the customer value by the average customer life span. Other factors to consider include:

• Customer retention rate.
• Customer churn rate.
• Average profit margins of each customer.

By analyzing customer data, customer lifetime value can be further refined to determine historical and predictive customer value. The former is the total gross profit from a customer’s previous purchases. The latter focuses on customer transactional habits to predict their future actions. These insights can inform omnichannel support offerings to ensure excellent customer experiences that expand lifetime value.

Building Relationships With Existing Customers Through Omnichannel Support Costs Less

Nurturing existing customer relationships is important not only to strengthen a brand, but also to save costs. Studies show that acquiring a new customer is 5% to 25% more expensive than retaining an existing one, considering the time, energy, and resources needed to earn new customers.

Business growth depends significantly on maintaining relationships with customers. When customers sense they are cherished, they become loyal and are less likely to switch to a competitor.

Not only do businesses save costs by satisfying existing customers, but they also harness a critical asset for growth. Here’s how sound omnichannel support for loyal customers is less expensive than for new ones:

• Knowing the preferences of repeat customers enables a personalized omnichannel service. Targeting new customers comes with a set of challenges. For instance, investing money across channels without knowing customers’ unique needs and desires may not actually convert potential customers to new customers.

• Post-sale omnichannel support is more affordable than targeting new customers pre-sale. Attracting potential customers requires a lot of investment such as running advertisements on Google, social media channels, and elsewhere. That’s not the case for existing customers.

• The success rate of selling to existing customers is 60% to 70%, much higher than the 5% to 20% success rate for new customers. Omnichannel customer support offers a higher likelihood of satisfying customers, deepening bonds, and boosting sales than targeting new ones who might not know about the brand or products.

The Power of Word-of-Mouth Marketing in Omnichannel Support 

Omnichannel customer service offers an opportunity to promote a brand by word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth marketing occurs when customers talk about a brand’s service and products with their family, friends, acquaintances, and even their social media followers. 

It’s one of the most powerful forms of marketing because 92% of customers trust their friends and family more than paid media. Customers with a higher net promoter score—the chance of them recommending a product—are advantageous to business growth.

Omnichannel customer service enhances loyalty and encourages word-of-mouth marketing.

Customer satisfaction stories spread like wildfire—and in today’s digital world, where more than 3.96 billion people use social media, that’s an invaluable chance to make an impact for a brand. 

The following are a few key elements of how effective omnichannel support encourages word-of-mouth marketing.

Map Out the Customer Journey

The primary goal of omnichannel support should be to improve the customer experience. To offer a flawless experience, it’s important to know the customer journey.

Mapping helps monitor and determine the best-performing part of the omnichannel strategy throughout the ever-changing customer journey. By visualizing a customer’s path to purchase, BPOs like iQor can provide insights to improve the experience for existing customers and promote word-of-mouth marketing.

Focus on Existing Customer Relationships

As stated earlier, protecting and nurturing the existing customer base is effective and less costly than targeting new customers. 

Successful omnichannel customer service supports human connections with current customers, even when utilizing artificial intelligence and digital tools. These connections create satisfied customers who recommend brand products and services to their peers.

Upload Content on Digital Platforms

Maintaining brand identity across digital platforms—especially on social media channels—creates a smoother customer journey. Content must include relevant, clear, and precise information that promotes the brand and improves the customer experience. Staying connected to customers and satisfying their needs encourages a positive brand image. And customers that share a positive experience with others can attract them to your brand.

Naturally, some new customers will come without even being specifically targeted by a brand. To this end, seamless omnichannel support can boost customer engagement and maximize results. 

Streamlined Support Strengthens Relationships

In a nutshell, customers are most likely to be appreciative of efficient, reliable customer support. When that support encompasses a strategic omnichannel approach provided by a BPO like iQor, it will sustain, strengthen, and nurture customer relationships through exceptional experiences that build brand loyalty.

Experience the iQor Difference

iQor’s omnichannel support experience helps brands connect with customers on their terms. Our CX experts partner with brands to design intelligent channel optimization strategies to ensure they are perfectly aligned with customer needs. From AI-powered agents to in-app messaging, iQor’s experience makes us a trusted partner in CX.

iQor is ideally suited to help brands create amazing customer experiences. iQor provides a comprehensive suite of full-service and self-service scalable offerings that are purpose-built to deliver enterprise-quality CX.

Our award-winning CX services include:

• A global presence with 40+ contact centers across 10 countries.
• A CX private cloud that maximizes performance and scales rapidly across multiple geographies on short notice.
• A partnership approach where we deploy agents and C-level executives to help maximize your ROI.
• The perfect blend of intelligent automation for scale and performance coupled with an irresistible culture comprised of people who love to delight your customers.
• Virtual and hybrid customer support options to connect with customers seamlessly, when and where they want.
• The ability to launch a customer support program quickly, even when you need thousands of agents ready to support your customers.
• A best-in-class workforce management team and supporting technology to create a centralized organization that can better serve your entire business.

iQor helps brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? If you’re ready to start a conversation with a customer experience expert, contact us to learn about how we can help you create more smiles.

Anupam Verma is director of digital solutions at iQor.

A Digital CX Strategy With Speech Analytics Reduces Risk Throughout the Customer Journey

A digital CX ecosystem that includes speech analytics offers endless opportunities to enhance business intelligence and improve the customer experience. One way is through risk management and regulatory compliance monitoring to ensure all steps of the customer journey mitigate risk and meet legal requirements.

Because all customer calls are recorded, business process outsourcing (BPO) companies like iQor can tailor speech analytics software to search for specific content based on a client’s needs in response to changing factors in the environment, whether the release of a new product or impacts from a natural disaster. One method to achieve this is through customizable keyword-based queries which tag any customer interactions that relate to the topic of concern and prompt a deeper data analysis. This empowers supervisors and program leadership to make adjustments to improve the customer experience through speech analytics, from coaching agents on particular areas of need to adjusting scripts and updating training protocols.

In this blog post, we will look at the capacity for customizable speech analytics to reduce risk and improve regulatory compliance monitoring in contact center environments. By harnessing the power of iQor’s proprietary speech analytics solution (VALDI), platform users can perform searches by keywords and data filters in response to changing needs. The results inform brands on the pulse of their customers to provide optimal customer experiences.

Speech analytics is part of a larger iQor digital transformation strategy to garner customer experience insights using advanced data analytics.

Through artificial intelligence (AI)-powered solutions, we can mine all recorded contact center calls and turn their content into actionable data to create smiles throughout the customer experience journey.   

What Is Speech Analytics in CX?

Speech analytics is an AI-powered digital technology that mines human speech and text. As a managed services provider of customer engagement and technology-enabled BPO solutions, iQor has developed a proprietary speech analytics platform that uses cloud computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to analyze every recorded interaction between agents and customers.

The Top Six Ways to Improve Risk Management and Compliance With Speech Analytics

Leveraging speech analytics has the power to mitigate risk and monitor regulatory and contractual compliance in contact center environments. The flexibility of customizable speech analytics solutions enables CX teams to identify areas of non-compliance and leverage digital capabilities to address and improve performance through coaching and training. Large quantities of data can be analyzed based on customized searches to identify areas in need of addressing. Then CX teams can summarize the data to inform decision making.

This data analysis process yields insights to improve numerous components that impact the customer experience. Optimized speech analytics improves risk management and regulatory compliance in the following six ways.

1. Identify Connection Issues to Maximize Uptime

Speech analytics solutions like iQor’s can include capabilities to detect connection issues. Static noise or voice cutting in and out may affect the quality of contact center interactions. VALDI speech analytics automatically tags calls containing phrases such as, “I can barely hear you” or “You’re breaking up.” These recordings can then be easily retrieved in the platform interface.

iQor’s speech analytics can identify these vulnerabilities so they can be properly addressed in a timely manner without having to manually review thousands of calls.

By reviewing only a fraction of calls, quality assurance (QA) specialists are able to determine if the communication problems resulted from actual line issues or whether they were caused by external factors such as difficulties hearing or challenges understanding the subject matter. These actionable insights empower contact center operations with the necessary business intelligence to take measured and appropriate actions, such as updating policies or agent scripts.

But this fraction of calls can still be too many to strategically address connection issues. How can CX teams identify persistent issues or tell the difference between a single temporary disruption and an acute problem leading to poor customer experience? In VALDI, all calls receive a Connection Issues (CI) Score which measures connection issues on a numerical scale. It is implemented by default on all client programs that utilize iQor’s speech analytics solution. On top of the query detections, the score uses a complex set of call data to provide a best connection issues risk estimation.

This metric is represented in a Connection Issues Report which provides a short list of agents at greatest risk of experiencing recurring problems. Supervisors can easily check on specific agents and determine appropriate next steps such as potentially moving them from a work-at-home environment to work-in-office. VALDI reporting also allows for comparing metrics, including CI Score averages, between teams and locations. Finally, an hourly distribution table provides insight into times of the day when connection issues tend to happen. In these ways, data empowers quality management, inspires best practices, and assists agent performance tracking in order to ultimately provide the best customer experience.

2. Discover Trends During Emergencies

In the event of emergencies such as weather-related events, natural disasters, data breaches, and pandemics, it is essential that BPOs like iQor are prepared to respond immediately and effectively to the needs of employees, clients, and the end customer. Speech analytics enables quick adaptations to identify and monitor trends on calls in order to provide responsive customer service experiences.

For instance, when COVID-19 prompted stay-at-home measures across the globe in early 2020, iQor implemented a targeted speech analytics query to detect every instance when an agent or customer mentioned the pandemic. Language analysts were able to quickly define keywords associated with COVID and cross-reference them with other topics present in the dialogue, like technicians’ visits or shipping. This approach led to the discovery of new trends and problems caused by the pandemic. Thanks to this insight, contact center operations could make informed decisions to proactively address a variety of current needs, such as shipping delays.

Speech analytics teams worked closely with operations teams to develop scripts to enable agents to respond effectively. For example, teams were able to improve the scheduling process for in-home technician service calls in part by modifying scripts to promote omnichannel self-service for the customer to modify their appointment in the event of a COVID quarantine. These measures protected technicians and empowered customers and agents with informed and efficient customer service options.

The COVID query has been deployed on all VALDI speech analytics programs to inform clients of trends and improve the customer experience. By empowering agents with scripts that prompted them to ask the customer the right questions in the moment, agents were able to provide excellent customer service to support brands in the midst of a global pandemic.

Additionally, iQor operations can independently browse through speech-to-text (S2T)-generated call transcripts whenever a new crisis hits without contacting VALDI support to arrange selected keywords into a query definition, even a complex one. The VALDI Text Search bar allows for instant searches on already processed calls. This may not make iQor entirely immune to external events impacting our clients’ businesses, but it allows operations to quickly rise to the challenge and navigate the uncertain, changing world as securely and wisely as possible.

3. Monitor Agent Compliance on KPIs

Speech analytics teams are able to develop specialized solutions to efficiently identify issues that may impact relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) in order to address them throughout a program and mitigate risk.

An example of such a KPI is call avoidance, an especially important risk in work-at-home (WAH) environments. The recent development of the Potential Call Avoidance (PCA) Score provided insight for operations teams to identify why it may be occurring and address it quickly to deliver a customer-centric approach throughout all voice interactions.

The PCA Score calculates the probability of call avoidance occurring in the call. It focuses on certain scenarios that affect customer satisfaction, like long holds and ghost calls. The reason behind these situations may be intentional call avoidance, but they may also occur due to connection issues or high call occupancy at a given time. Each case is different and VALDI speech analytics users are strongly encouraged to review the calls to confirm or reject call avoidance and develop appropriate interventions.

Manual call verification may prove daunting, even though the PCA Score is triggered in a very small portion of all client calls. This is why iQor’s speech analytics enables operations to quickly identify agents with the highest ratio of risky calls to ensure proper agent training and consistently great CX. By accessing speech analytics reporting, contact center operations can quickly identify the lowest-performing agents and intervene with targeted coaching and training.

The PCA Score has proven efficient in providing actionable insights, improving agent performance, and lowering call average handle times. These Score-based findings have also prompted some operations teams to modify policies, to ensure consistently high levels of service. The ultimate goal, however, is to provide the best customer experience by limiting or eliminating situations that customers may find difficult or frustrating. Higher Net Promoter Score (NPS) values show the benefits of acknowledging, researching, and addressing call avoidance as one of the risks in CX.

4. Ensure Agents Adhere to Scripts

The increased number of WAH contact center agents at the onset of COVID accelerated the need to monitor proper adherence to scripts to make sure agents deliver the same level of customer service, regardless of their work environment. Custom keyword searches through speech analytics provide insight into calls to ensure agents communicate according to the scripts and prompts provided on their program.

5. React to Negative Experiences

VALDI applies artificial intelligence to measure CX by calculating customer sentiment in each interaction and linking calls with post-call surveys and NPS values. Additionally, language analysts create query definitions aimed at detecting any negative feedback and communication barriers. Researching these areas allows for successful agent training.

6. Prevent Legal Risks

Speech analytics solutions facilitate effective quality assurance and audit functions at scale, regardless of call recording volume.

Data scientists can create queries and sub-queries to drill down on specific issues, identify trends, and develop interventions to improve service in unique circumstances.

For example, program teams can use speech analytics to identify the exchange of credit card information in customer service calls. This functionality allows operations teams to limit their audit to only the calls that contain credit card data.

For one client that wanted to ensure credit card data was not discussed on customer calls, iQor tracked more than 46,000 calls with significantly less effort than would be required if we had done so manually. A query was built to identify the calls on which the term “credit card” was mentioned. The team then created sub-queries to further focus the detection to identify card information.

The result was a nearly 100% reduction in the number of calls in need of audit.

Speech analytics capabilities produced exponential savings in time and cost while protecting the client with valid PCI compliance.

Speech analytics also simplifies the creation of cease-and-desist lists to guarantee that customers who indicate they don’t want to be contacted are removed from call lists in order to meet customer expectations, regulatory requirements, and protect the client’s reputation.

What Differentiates iQor’s Proprietary Speech Analytics Solution?

At iQor, we deploy our internally developed speech analytics technology, VALDI, to enhance customer service delivery that many of the world’s top brands outsource to us. Each instance is customized to the unique needs of the client—in terms of search filters, reporting modules, and data types.

Our speech analytics solution is excellent for risk management because it offers flexibility when a new problem arises, whereas commercial, off-the-shelf tools typically either can’t be modified or require significant time and cost to do so. And you don’t need to be an expert to use it!

Several key attributes of iQor’s speech analytics solution include the following:

• VALDI evolves according to client needs with the capacity to quickly build new capabilities in short timeframes to proactively address changing circumstances.
• It offers customer experience analytics that shields clients from potential risks at scale.
• iQor operations are empowered to use VALDI technology to make informed decisions.
• Its video capabilities help QA to monitor agent performance by reviewing the recorded agent screen capture synchronized with the audio.
• Nothing in VALDI is random—every signal and query is designed to drill down into specific needs.

This proactive combination of digital CX technology with artificial intelligence and human review provides a holistic approach to improve the customer experience and create smiles.

Experience the Best in Speech Analytics

iQor’s proprietary speech analytics platform uses a combination of cloud computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to extract every customer interaction for actionable data insights delivered as a custom solution with outsourced CX services.

iQor is ideally suited to help brands create amazing customer experiences. iQor provides a comprehensive suite of full-service and self-service scalable offerings that are purpose-built to deliver enterprise-quality CX.

Our award-winning CX services include:

• A global presence with 40+ contact centers across 10 countries.
• A CX private cloud that maximizes performance and scales rapidly across multiple geographies on short notice.
• A partnership approach where we deploy agents and C-level executives to help maximize your ROI.
• The perfect blend of intelligent automation for scale and performance coupled with an irresistible culture comprised of people who love to delight your customers.
• Virtual and hybrid customer support options to connect with customers seamlessly, when and where they want.
• The ability to launch a customer support program quickly, even when you need thousands of agents ready to support your customers.
• A best-in-class workforce management team and supporting technology to create a centralized organization that can better serve your entire business.

iQor helps brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? If you’re ready to start a conversation with a customer experience expert, contact us to learn about how we can help you create more smiles.

Monika Starczewska is director of Analytics at iQor.

Irena Michalewicz is manager of Information Services at iQor.

They are both part of the VALDI Team.

Contact Center as a Service Is Great for the Customer Experience

In today’s digital world, world-class customer service has to provide a customer experience that reflects the way people prefer to engage with companies. Being placed on hold while waiting for the “next available representative” isn’t it. Contact center as a service (CCaaS) offers businesses exceptional customer experiences with integrated communication channels for an optimized service delivery model. In this post we delve into the benefits of utilizing CCaaS on a digital CX journey, drawing on iQor’s extensive experience as a digital business process outsourcing company that makes customers smile.

Using cloud-based software, contact center as a service handles customer interaction through an omnichannel-enabled contact center that covers all stages of the customer service journey. This contact center solution replaces outdated call centers with digital technology that provides personalization and automation for customer inquiries, voice calls, interactive responses, intelligent virtual agents, social media, chat, email, texting, and speech analytics. 

The contact center as a service model allows brands to partner with a BPO like iQor to handle all aspects of customer service through a cloud-based contact center infrastructure.

Instead of every contact being siloed by department or agent, CCaaS delivers a complete overview of customer behavior, including all interactions a customer has had with a company and the communication channels they’ve used. This information enables contact center agents to provide personalized, up-to-date support that quickly resolves customer concerns and builds customer loyalty. 

Contact center as a service also improves workforce job satisfaction. Seamlessly combining options for live interactions with customer service representatives as well as automated self-service increases agent productivity and reduces redundant and mundane work. Contact center technology puts the power of digital and traditional communication channels into the hands of customer service agents.

The Benefits of Contact Center as a Service

Companies that want to experience digital customer experience success by efficiently providing the best customer service experience will benefit from contact center as a service. The advantages of using this service model include the following. 

Better Customer Experience

A cloud-based contact center gives customers more options. Whether they choose to call in by voice or use digital channels—such as social media, text messaging, email, or live chat—customers can access support in the way that’s most convenient for them. Customer satisfaction is the top priority for most companies. Using a cloud solution to provide accurate, real-time customer support can help achieve that. 

Reduced Cost and Increased Efficiency

Outsourcing customer experience management to a cloud-based contact center reduces the number of resources devoted to customer support delivery. With CCaaS, companies pay only for what they need without the overhead associated with maintaining an on-site customer service center. CCaaS eliminates the costs associated with physical buildings, hardware, and energy, as well as HR and IT support because the BPO providing the service handles all the infrastructure details. Additionally, it prevents companies from investing in a system with a lot of features they won’t use just to access the ones they need. 

Moreover, contact center software provides flexibility for customer service employees to work remotely and collaboratively while simultaneously ensuring endpoint security and data compliance measures are in place. All of the tools agents need to provide excellent customer service are available in one place. They can easily share files and see previous customer interactions. This all-in-one cloud solution boosts the efficiency of the entire team. Since CCaaS provides automated tools for many tasks, it also cuts down on the work agents must do, freeing them up to focus on more important tasks that delight customers. 

Actionable Insights

The CCaaS solution not only produces a more memorable customer experience but also provides important data to analyze and inform actionable insights. These business intelligence insights can drive the business strategy. If the same issue crops up repeatedly, it can be addressed at the source. Furthermore, contact center technology delivers metrics to track and improve productivity and agent responsiveness. 

It also offers insight into customers’ preferred channels for customer service. If, for example, most customers interact with customer service agents through social media, brands can devote more resources to an effective social media monitoring strategy. Additionally, using CCaaS technology to track hold times can improve workforce management and inform staffing needs to save money and improve CSAT metrics. 

Differences Between Call Centers and Contact Centers and Why They Matter

Call centers and contact centers are both centralized locations for providing customer support. A traditional call center does this primarily through agents handling telephone calls, while a contact center empowers customer service representatives to use a variety of digital channels for connecting with customers, such as texting, social media, live chat, email, and voice calls. 

It’s easy to think of contact centers as just call centers that use more channels, but there are more substantial differences that separate the two. A call center will typically accept an inbound call from a customer who is contacting them to answer a question or solve a problem. Even when call centers provide more channels for customer communication, they’re still primarily addressing an issue in an isolated manner. 

In contrast, contact centers provide customer satisfaction at all stages of the customer journey. Customers expect a fast response and a personalized experience when dealing with businesses whose products and services they consume, and contact centers provide that using omnichannel enhanced tools. 

Another big difference between contact centers and call centers is that contact centers provide analytical metrics to track and evaluate different aspects of the customer journey. This data is essential for driving the customer service strategy as well as influencing the broader business strategy.

Because of the focus on the entire customer journey as well as providing actionable insights, contact centers are a more holistic approach to customer experience than call centers. 

Best Practices for Harnessing Contact Center as a Service

One of the biggest challenges when switching to a contact center as a service model is figuring out how to integrate it into existing systems. The most important step in finding a solution is to determine short-, medium-, and long-term needs. This list of the top four priorities helps to get the most out of this model. 

1.   Focus on Customer Experience First

Toprovide the best possible customer experience, a contact center as a service provider like iQor should offer services and tools such as social media monitoring to improve service levels based on customer feedback. These tools allow brands to go beyond just putting out fires to proactively create a great customer experience throughout their journey with your brand. 

2.   Take Advantage of Automation 

Since efficiency is one of the biggest benefits of contact center as a service, a CCaaS provider like iQor can integrate tools that support contact center automation. These tools help increase operational efficiency, agent productivity, and quality assurance. Interactive voice response systems that capture customers’ numbers on incoming calls and call back when an agent is available are a great example. By eliminating hold times, customer satisfaction rates can greatly improve. 

3.   Implement Workforce Optimization 

Quality monitoring and performance management metrics let agents and supervisors quickly improve their performance. Based on these metrics, quality management procedures can be implemented to generate quick gains in customer satisfaction as well as employee happiness. Cloud-enabled contact centers can further reduce customer service inefficiencies by using performance dashboards to track agent productivity. 

4.   Provide Effective Agent Training

The customer experience journey will only be as good as the customer service agents. CCaaS technologies can provide targeted training based on known topics that need attention. This training can be delivered through a combination of in-person and online courses leveraging neuro-based learning methods. 

CCaaS Elevates Your Brand Experience

Contact center as a service brings big data insights and advantages to businesses of every size.

The scalable nature of CCaaS means that the solution can grow with the business without consuming additional resources. It simplifies experiences for customer service employees and for customers interacting with the brand. CCaaS offers a streamlined, cost-effective approach to a customer service model tailored to the needs of a brand to ensure rewarding customer experiences in a digital CX environment.

Experience the Best in CX

iQor’s contact center as a service model channels iQor’s digital ecosystem of customer service solutions to produce targeted improvements for the employee, customer, and client.

iQor is ideally suited to help brands create amazing customer experiences. iQor provides a comprehensive suite of full-service and self-service scalable offerings that are purpose-built to deliver enterprise-quality CX.

Our award-winning CX services include:

• A global presence with 40+ contact centers across 10 countries.

• A CX private cloud that maximizes performance and scales rapidly across multiple geographies on short notice.

• A partnership approach where we deploy agents and C-level executives to help maximize your ROI.

• The perfect blend of intelligent automation for scale and performance coupled with an irresistible culture comprised of people who love to delight your customers.

• Virtual and hybrid customer support options to connect with customers seamlessly, when and where they want.

• The ability to launch a customer support program quickly, even when you need thousands of agents ready to support your customers.

• A best-in-class workforce management team and supporting technology to create a centralized organization that can better serve your entire business.

iQor helps brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? If you’re ready to start a conversation with a customer experience expert, contact us to learn about how we can help you create more smiles.

Richard Temple is senior vice president of IT Transformation at iQor.

Analytics as a Service Creates Custom Problem-Solving Solutions to Empower Employees and Improve CX

Seemingly endless quantities of big data offer today’s brands many opportunities for data-driven innovation. However, to make such large quantities of data relevant and accessible to inform decisions, it is essential to integrate data scientists into the business culture and processes. Indeed, through analytics as a service, data scientists can offer guidance and expertise in choosing which metrics to use to improve outcomes. But for many businesses, accessing this data is elusive and even more challenging to sort through and analyze to inform decisions, strategy, and operations to improve experiences for employees and customers.

That’s where analytics as a service comes in as part of a digital ecosystem designed to create rewarding employee and customer experiences that build brand loyalty. With analytics as a service, customer support programs have access to massive amounts of data along with the data scientists and operations teams to make sense of it.

Digital transformation strategies that include advanced data analytics can provide insight into all steps of the customer journey and provide information about challenges along the way to inform custom solutions that improve outcomes.

Culling, storing, sorting, analyzing, and using the data to develop and test interventions is a lengthy and detailed process. Business process outsourcing (BPO) companies like iQor with a vast digital ecosystem can harness advances in artificial intelligence (AI)-powered solutions along with the expertise of our data scientists and operations teams to cover all aspects of data analytics, from start to finish, to create measurable outcomes that improve employee and customer experiences at scale. 

What Is Analytics as a Service?

Data-based digital technology solutions drive meaningful results. But in order to do so, that data must be analyzed effectively. In any customer service environment, when operations encounters an issue they are unable to resolve efficiently, data scientists can provide assistance. Through powerful analytics, data scientists can assess a problem and recommend how to best fix it. The solution is data-driven according to the particular operating environment.

As a managed services provider of customer engagement and technology-enabled BPO solutions, iQor offers analytics as a service as part of our comprehensive solutions to create great customer experiences that build brand loyalty.

iQor’s 12 terabytes of data stored on our private CX cloud is accessible to our data scientists for analytics. But regardless of how much data exists, in order to make data analytics useful, it must yield meaningful and pragmatic results.

Analytics as a service is a multi-step process involving strong collaboration between data scientists and operations teams to identify and solve problems that reduces costs and improves performance.

It is important for data scientists to build relationships with operations teams as part of a broader data-driven culture to best understand customer service program requirements. This enables the data scientists to structure their data analyses specific to each problem to develop purposeful and manageable interventions for each distinct group. The process typically starts small to test the analytics solution on one subgroup, and then gradually expands to incorporate the entire customer service program.

Because each project uses different technologies, algorithms, and tools, there are many opportunities for different technical connections. These enable data scientists to effectively identify risk and look for data outliers in the program by analyzing related statistics and scores specific to each program element.

Data journalism is an essential part of this process. Because of the technical nature of AI algorithm outputs, the information is not typically consumable by operations teams or anyone without data science expertise. As part of an ongoing effort to ensure strong and productive working relationships between data science and operations, iQor’s data scientists focus on the explicability of the outputs to create savvy translations from technical research and statistics into actionable insights that can inform operational decisions and improve outcomes.

The 10 Steps of Deploying Data Analytics

To understand the process and the power of harnessing data science analytics to improve the customer experience, it’s helpful to look at it through a real-world example. Over the span of one and a half years, iQor implemented a data analytics as a service solution designed to improve dialer optimization strategies to reach higher-risk customers for a prominent credit card issuer in the United States.

The analytics as a service solution yielded amazing results. The client saw a 180% increase in inbound right party contacts, a 15% reduction in dialer spend, and a 2% improvement in roll rate, savings thousands of dollars each month while simultaneously increasing revenue by thousands each month. Moreover, the analytics solution helped customers get back on track and deepened brand loyalty.

To yield such powerful results, iQor’s data scientists deployed a 10-step analytics as a service process as part of iQor’s digital technology ecosystem that creates irresistible CX solutions. By following our tried-and-true set of best practices for analytics success, we delivered strong outcomes for the customer, employee, and client.

Step 1: Pinpoint the Problem

The first step of analytics as a service is to identify the core problem that needs fixing. Using the credit card issuer case study as an example, the core problem was the challenge of reaching a certain subset of customers.

The advent of cell phones altered the effectiveness of outbound customer service calls. Caller ID empowered customers to decline calls and number blocking enabled them to prevent many calls from even going through to the customer. This made it increasingly challenging for customer service representatives to reach customers by phone. The goal was to reduce the number of outbound calls per customer while reaching the same number of customers.

Step 2: Data Discovery

Once the problem is identified, the next phase of analytics as a service involves accessing the data warehouse to cull all relevant data to support the problem-solving process. This data mining includes gathering records of customer interactions and disposition codes, customer surveys, account details, and all other relevant data points from a massive pool of data.

Step 3: Analyze Outcomes Within Data

Once the relevant data are identified, the next step in the analytics process is to analyze the data according to outcomes. In the outbound calling example, this included a variety of outcomes. Did customer service agents reach the wrong number when dialing the number associated with the customer account? Did they reach the wrong party? Did the call lead to voicemail? Did the customer service agent reach the customer? Were they able to help the customer get back on track with (or through) a payment schedule? What is the customer’s payment history?

By analyzing the data according to various relevant outcomes, data scientists are able to more clearly see patterns and trends.

Step 4: Identify Trends in the Data

By joining data tables from the different outcomes together, data scientists can make relevant associations and find valuable insights. In identifying trends and associations among all the results, they can make sense of large quantities of data to inform decision-making related to the specific goal or problem.

Step 5: Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)

With the problem named, data sorted, and trends identified, the fifth step in the analytics process involves looking closely at how the business is actually operating. Data scientists communicate openly with operations to share data and potential findings with them. Through this open and ongoing dialogue, data scientists delve into an exploratory phase and are able to gather more information to better understand the meaning of each data point, what it represents, and how to best utilize it to create solutions for the problem.

Step 6: Experimental Design for Solutions

Next, the data scientists take their analysis and use it to inform their data-backed decisions and solutions. This is a critically important phase for ensuring data scientists make a positive impact on the operating environment. The goal is to start small, implementing solutions on a micro-scale to test their results before rolling them out on a broader level. This stage can be the most challenging aspect of analytics as a service if data scientists are perceived as outsiders wanting to change business operations. But, in a data-based culture with strong relationships and open communication in place, this stage can yield powerful results.

When the data scientists and the operations team partner together to implement solutions with the goal of boosting outcomes, the collaboration can produce great improvements.

Step 7: Understand the Parameters and Group for Similarities

By harnessing the power of artificial intelligence, data scientists can group the data into more specified clusters for more meaningful results. Data scientists can develop an AI algorithm to identify specified data according to certain similarities between customers, separating it into any number of clusters. The goal is to further group the data into distinct clusters that are still large enough to be meaningful. In this example for optimizing outbound calls, they separated the data into three clusters to generate the most meaningful results. The goal is then to apply the most appropriate intervention to each of these separate clusters.

Step 8: Apply the Intervention

When applying the intervention, our data scientists always start small with one of the cluster groups. This makes the interventions more manageable for operations because the solution is tested on one small group within a cluster instead of the entire program at once. This also facilitates a more focused measurement of the various impacts of the intervention.

Step 9: Measure the Impact

Once applied to the cluster group, it is essential to measure the impact of the intervention. Through careful experimental design with the test group and control group, data scientists measure and analyze results to identify differences and solve the specific problem.

Step 10: Refine Processes and Scale to the Entire Program

While testing the intervention on a small group and a control group, data scientists work with operations to optimize existing processes (adjust the intensity, timing, etc. of intervention) to make them more efficient for the entire program. It is essential that the goal for the program solution remain clear throughout this process to drive relevant results. After tweaking the intervention, data scientists and operations collaborate to scale the solution to the entire program, generating improvements and outstanding results.

Analytics as a Service Improves CX and Increases Revenue

Analytics as a service powered by AI and clearly defined processes by data scientists can yield tremendous results in the customer experience. In this example, to improve outbound processes for a major credit card issuer, the team of data scientists identified a way to dial less while still reaching the same number of customers. In fact, they reduced outbound dialing by almost two-thirds but still reached the same number of customers.

Moreover, using data and analytics they reduced dialing attempts from eight to four daily calls. Through analytics as a service, they determined the efficacy of leaving a voicemail message after four call attempts. Many customers that received a message called back. Inbound call volume increased from customers who then worked with customer service representatives to develop payment plans that worked for them, helping them get back on track and building brand loyalty. With analytics as a service, the program saw increased revenue through inbound channels and greater outcomes from accounts receivable management, two very difficult outcomes to achieve.

Experience the Best in Data Analytics

iQor’s analytics as a service offering uses a combination of iQor’s proprietary speech analytics platform, cloud computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data analysis to develop custom interventions for identified areas in need of improvement along the customer journey. The results produce targeted improvements for the employee, customer, and client.

iQor is ideally suited to help brands create amazing customer experiences. iQor provides a comprehensive suite of full-service and self-service scalable offerings that are purpose-built to deliver enterprise-quality CX.

Our award-winning CX services include:

• A global presence with 40+ contact centers across 10 countries.
• A CX private cloud that maximizes performance and scales rapidly across multiple geographies on short notice.
• A partnership approach where we deploy agents and C-level executives to help maximize your ROI.
• The perfect blend of intelligent automation for scale and performance coupled with an irresistible culture comprised of people who love to delight your customers.
• Virtual and hybrid customer support options to connect with customers seamlessly, when and where they want.
• The ability to launch a customer support program quickly, even when you need thousands of agents ready to support your customers.
• A best-in-class workforce management team and supporting technology to create a centralized organization that can better serve your entire business.

iQor helps brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? If you’re ready to start a conversation with a customer experience expert, contact us to learn about how we can help you create more smiles.

Andrew Reilly is a data scientist on the AI & Data Science Team at iQor.

SMS Messaging Elevates Customer Support Offerings in the Digital Transformation Journey

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, CX needs to be seamless and easy, accessible to customers when and where they want. Consumers want to engage with brands in real-time through authentic interactions across omnichannel platforms, staying connected and on-the-go. To this end, customers often prefer conversational SMS messaging to address their customer service needs.

Short message service (SMS) text messaging is a fast and convenient way to provide helpful customer service. In this post, we explore the role of SMS text messaging in customer support delivery. It is part of broader intelligent channel optimization strategies that a business process outsourcing (BPO) partner like iQor can design to ensure customer support channels are perfectly aligned with customers’ needs.

What Is SMS Customer Support?

Simply put, SMS customer support service refers to the omnichannel support a brand provides its consumers through text messaging. The service doesn’t demand any physical interaction and is entirely virtual.

According to GigaOm, 98% of text messages are successfully opened on average. In the case of emails, however, the rate is only 22%. Moreover, the SMS engagement rate is three to five times higher than with emails.

In fact, 90% of SMS messages are read within three minutes of receipt.

This means that if you want to interact with your customers, one of the best ways is to give them the opportunity to communicate with your brand through SMS text messaging.

Benefits of Using SMS Messaging in Customer Support

As a managed services provider of customer engagement and technology-enabled BPO solutions, iQor has experience creating SMS channels for customer support that produce numerous benefits for businesses.

Customer Satisfaction

With SMS messaging, customers can communicate with brands more conveniently. The interactive nature of SMS can create a stronger connection at the moment of customer contact.

Additionally, according to recent statistics, the chances of customers replying to a text message are four times higher than responding to a call. Thus, SMS can prove to be quite beneficial when it comes to customer service excellence.

Cost-Efficiency

There is no doubt that it is more cost-efficient to support customer service inquiries via text rather than over the phone, while simultaneously enabling the customer to access that support through their preferred channel. Indeed, a service agent can support more than one customer at a time with fast response times through SMS messaging. Further, with the integration of AI-powered chatbots, SMS messaging provides efficient and reliable service.

Flexibility

SMS texting provides the flexibility to curate different customer experience strategies. For instance, scripts can be created specifically for SMS messaging and can be tailored to boost awareness about key offerings.

In addition, videos, links, and images can be shared via text to promote specific customer support messages, goods, and services.

Speed

SMS messaging helps provide the end user on-demand support in real-time, 24/7/365. Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered bots can respond to a high volume of inquiries through SMS, reducing the need for customers to speak with live agents.

Accessibility

A customer may not open Facebook Messenger regularly, but they will almost never miss a text message on their mobile phone. SMS messaging offers instant access to customers and facilitates simple and rewarding interactions with your brand.

Building an Effective SMS Strategy for Customer Support

Given the undeniable benefits of SMS messaging, BPOs like iQor can create custom solutions to integrate SMS messaging capabilities into the digital customer experience to create smiles throughout a streamlined customer journey with your brand.

An effective SMS customer support strategy includes various features, such as the following:

Automated FAQs

Instead of using live agents to repeatedly answer the same common questions, chatbots can respond to FAQs quickly and consistently, freeing up agents to focus on addressing more complex issues. This creates more rewarding experiences with higher levels of customer satisfaction.

Collect Feedback

SMS messaging offers a direct and immediate channel to encourage customers to share feedback on their customer experience, your product, and/or your service.

Collecting feedback as part of the SMS customer strategy helps achieve two things. First, it provides an understanding of areas that might require improvements. Second, customers will feel that their words carry value and are important for the brand’s business goals.

Keep Customers Informed

An SMS messaging campaign should be consumer-centric and must be designed to keep customers informed about promotions, updates, and orders. Such a strategy helps increase customer retention and brand loyalty.

For SMS messaging, the text must be straightforward. Flashy language and long-winded explanations only work for emails, sometimes. Texts should be short and to the point at all times.

Use Different Support Channels With SMS

An omnichannel strategy allows customers to choose the medium of communication that suits them best. So, for instance, if a certain service issue is complex, customers should be able to transition seamlessly from SMS to email or voice with live agents to effortlessly receive the customer support they need.

Best Practices for SMS Customer Support Delivery

An effective SMS text messaging strategy encompasses certain best practices:

Establish Clear Goals

When implementing SMS customer service strategies, BPOs like iQor work with brands to develop clear objectives.

Whether the goal is customer satisfaction, cost-efficiency, or digital transformation, it is important to prioritize goals in order to develop an effective SMS messaging game plan.

Categorize Incoming Messages

Establishing a clear SMS messaging management system facilitates the efficient handling of bulk messages. BPOs like iQor can categorize SMS messages according to the time they are received, their value, or their urgency, among other filters. In addition, integrating chatbots into the SMS system can further facilitate the handling of large numbers of queries.

Train Customer Support Agents

Customer support agents must be trained not only on how to use the technology but also on how to communicate professionally in ways that align with the brand while maintaining the human touch in communication.

The language and tone of agents on live chat, texts, or even social media platforms reflect the identity and values of the brand. Utilizing data analytics and regular social media monitoring to inform coaching and ongoing employee development can help ensure timely and effective customer service through SMS that makes people smile.

Promote Customer Support SMS Offerings

In order to use SMS messaging for support, customers must know about it.

As part of a comprehensive digital customer experience strategy, the availability of SMS support can be promoted through channels like social media, on-site apps, and phone calls. Providing links and details on the company website, app, and social media pages will let customers know about this customer service option. Additionally, advertising SMS messaging to a captive audience of customers when they call in for support can direct them to choose the messaging channel in the moment, thereby reducing calls in the queue for live agents.

Experience the iQor Difference

iQor is ideally suited to help brands create amazing customer experiences. iQor provides a comprehensive suite of full-service and self-service scalable offerings that are purpose-built to deliver enterprise-quality CX.

Our award-winning CX services include:

• A global presence with 40+ contact centers across 10 countries.
• A CX private cloud that maximizes performance and scales rapidly across multiple geographies on short notice.
• A partnership approach where we deploy agents and C-level executives to help maximize your ROI.
• The perfect blend of intelligent automation for scale and performance coupled with an irresistible culture comprised of people who love to delight your customers.
• Virtual and hybrid customer support options to connect with customers seamlessly, when and where they want.
• The ability to launch a customer support program quickly, even when you need thousands of agents ready to support your customers.
• A best-in-class workforce management team and supporting technology to create a centralized organization that can better serve your entire business.

iQor helps brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? If you’re ready to start a conversation with a customer experience expert, contact us to learn about how we can help you create more smiles.

Anupam Verma is director of digital solutions at iQor.

A Digital Transformation Strategy that Utilizes Speech Analytics Enhances the Customer Experience

Today’s digital transformation environment offers seemingly endless opportunities to empower individuals and improve outcomes. A digital ecosystem that includes speech analytics is one way to harness technology to create transformative customer service experiences that build brand loyalty. In this post, we delve into the benefits of using customizable speech analytics to improve all aspects of the customer experience.

Even though big data has been a part of the business lexicon for over a decade, many companies do not take advantage of the data-driven insights that could give them a competitive edge. Much of the richest data points are only available in an unstructured format. Unlike structured data, unstructured data aren’t readily available in a searchable configuration like a database. Because they are not easily accessible, unstructured data require more effort to extract and analyze.  

Unstructured data comprise between 80% and 90% of all data produced, making them an incredibly valuable asset for improving performance in all areas. This is particularly true in call centers. The ubiquitous recording of calls for quality assurance is essential, but it must be accompanied by effective data analysis to make sense of the interactions and inform recommendations for improvement.

That’s where digital transformation comes in with access to customer experience insights using advanced data analytics. When brands have access to interaction and predictive analytics, they can truly lead from a customer-centric standpoint. They gain a complete view of the entire customer journey, as well as the capacity to retrieve deep, granular insights into what is influencing the customer experience, why it’s happening, and how to improve outcomes.

Manual data extraction is generally cost-prohibitive and inefficient. Fortunately, business process outsourcing (BPO) companies like iQor with a vast digital ecosystem harness advances in artificial intelligence (AI)-powered solutions to analyze copious amounts of data and put them to good use. Speech analytics, like iQor’s cutting-edge proprietary platform (VALDI) developed by our in-house data scientists, can mine all recorded contact center calls and turn their content into actionable data. We, in turn, use this data to elevate employee and customer experiences while improving outcomes for clients to create smiles throughout the customer service journey.  

What Is Speech Analytics in Customer Service?

Speech analytics is a type of digital technology based on machine learning that excavates human speech and text. As a managed services provider of customer engagement and technology-enabled BPO solutions, iQor has developed a proprietary speech analytics platform that uses cloud computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to mine every available recorded omnichannel interaction between agents and customers.

As part of iQor’s digital technology ecosystem for CX solutions, our speech analytics platform is delivered as a service uniquely tailored to each client’s individual and evolving needs. We convert treasure troves of information into usable data to drive important decisions throughout the customer journey. Our customizations include features such as:

• Personalized speech analytics queries that empower our teams to deep-dive on each call.
• Capabilities to identify agents in need of support.
• Pinpointing recurring topics.
• Determining necessary adjustments to scripts, protocols, and coaching interventions.

In contrast, commercial off-the-shelf speech analytics tools offer standard analytics capabilities marketed to a general audience; personalizing these tools can be impossible, costly, and/or time-consuming. While helpful, a one-size-fits-all approach to speech analytics doesn’t produce the same level of interaction analyses personalized to the individual needs of a business.

iQor’s custom CX solutions include omnichannel customer interaction analytics that equips call center teams to uncover the trends driving customer calls, which can provide significant value for the client and augment the customer experience. Additionally, custom speech analytics facilitates the identification of potential friction points or bottlenecks in the customer experience and helps teams evaluate contact center agent compliance and performance across all avenues of omnichannel engagement.  

Best Uses of Speech Analytics in Call Centers

Voice analytics has numerous use cases in customer service. A catalyst that inspires data-driven decision-making to improve training techniques for individual agents, speech analytics provides actionable insights that increase business value. The following are common use cases for speech analytics in call centers. 

Increased customer satisfaction

The customer experience reigns supreme in a contact center. Customer interaction analytics can clarify what customers want when they call, the reasons for repeat calls, how agents can better meet customer needs, and what factors lead to fantastic interactions with customers. In addition, natural language processing can analyze customer sentiment and help call center agents anticipate when customers are likely to abandon a brand and what measures they can take to prevent that.  

Individualized agent training

A speech analytics tool can help quantify the performance of individual agents and identify any gaps in their customer support training. Supervisors can then provide targeted coaching and training that hones in on specific issues, eliminating the need to spend time and money on unnecessary training.  

Workforce optimization

A lot goes into staffing a contact center with trained and qualified agents based on the anticipated call volume; utilizing speech analytics is a proven way to improve operational efficiencies throughout the workforce. By classifying calls, uncovering root causes, using predictive analytics, and exposing patterns, speech analytics technology can enable streamlined customer interactions with agents to increase efficiency and optimize customer care.  

How Speech Analytics Improves the Customer Experience

Purposefully utilizing speech analytics elevates the contact center as the customer experience hub. Insights gained from the contact center can improve the entire customer experience in the following ways. 

Correlate cause and effect to improve interactions

Customizable speech analytics solutions like iQor’s, help connect specific reasons for various outcomes. Identifying the source of unsatisfactory outcomes facilitates changes that can eliminate them and improve the customer experience. Likewise, identifying the practices that result in positive outcomes empowers supervisors to encourage more agents to adopt them through coaching. Integrating business intelligence insights into coaching and training sessions improves performance, employee satisfaction, and retention while also providing positive outcomes throughout the customer journey.  

Improve customer retention

Analyzing customer sentiment can reveal the root causes of customer dissatisfaction. Using AI-powered speech analytics, we can pinpoint which customers are most at risk for churn and how agents can effectively head it off. If a customer uses language associated with churn, the agent can employ loyalty incentives to encourage customer retention. The language associated with customer loyalty can also be identified and promoted to offer insight into customer perceptions and help create more satisfying experiences that make customers smile.  

Provide insight into omnichannel experiences

Integrating the omnichannel experience into a comprehensive digital transformation strategy reduces the siloed effect associated with some customer service offerings; using speech analytics can help identify customer preferences and expectations across channels. Understanding why customers prefer specific channels allows the customer service team to provide the resources they need to engage customers in the manner they prefer. In addition, speech analytics provides actionable insight into which channels and resources produce the best ROI in terms of customer satisfaction to deliver the best customer experiences.  

Give agents a framework for empathetic listening

Some customers are already unhappy by the time they place a call to a contact center. Speech analytics technology identifies words and phrases that indicate when customers are unhappy and at risk of churning. They can also identify specific words and phrases that generate a positive response in unhappy customers. When contact center agents have this insight, they can convey an empathetic response that makes the customer feel valued, reinforces their loyalty to the brand, and generates a positive outcome.  

Real-time analytics can take this concept even further through predictive customer service by notifying agents when a call is heading in the wrong direction. Agents can be prompted to use the most effective measures to rescue the call and deliver a meaningful and positive customer experience.  

Key Features of a Speech Analytics Platform

An interaction analytics solution like iQor’s customizable proprietary speech analytics provides insight throughout the customer journey to see the complete picture and inform best practices and improvements. Some key features of speech analytics in a digital ecosystem include the following.  

Omnichannel insight

Speech analytics technology that provides advanced data processing and multidimensional analyses across channels provides the most valuable insights. iQor’s proprietary speech analytics technology, known as VALDI, delivers these insights in a single robust platform that makes collecting the data throughout the omnichannel experience quick and effective. In addition, this data provides relevant KPIs to target for optimization.  

Easy integration

A customer analytics solution should easily integrate into the existing technology framework and be customizable to adapt to domain-specific language and legacy systems for each client. Additionally, the solution must be configured to help achieve current short- and long-term goals as well as respond to changing needs.  

Searchable system

Automated reports are useful when trying to glean valuable insights from data. A fully customizable solution like iQor’s can readily search all customer interactions. Accurate call transcription and detailed, searchable information on all characteristics of an interaction are essential to optimizing quality assurance procedures.  

Customizable tracking

Another proven invaluable aspect of customer analytics is the ability to analyze and flag interactions for topics of interest to inform protocols and reduce risk. This attribute provides insight into trends and patterns, generates reports on micro issues, and sets up automatic alerts based on evolving needs.  

Experience the Best in Speech Analytics

iQor’s proprietary speech analytics platform, VALDI, uses a combination of cloud computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to extract every customer interaction for actionable data insights delivered as a custom solution.

iQor is ideally suited to help brands create amazing customer experiences. iQor provides a comprehensive suite of full-service and self-service scalable offerings that are purpose-built to deliver enterprise-quality CX.

Our award-winning CX services include:

• A global presence with 40+ contact centers across 10 countries.
• A CX private cloud that maximizes performance and scales rapidly across multiple geographies on short notice.
• A partnership approach where we deploy agents and C-level executives to help maximize your ROI.
• The perfect blend of intelligent automation for scale and performance coupled with an irresistible culture comprised of people who love to delight your customers.
• Virtual and hybrid customer support options to connect with customers seamlessly, when and where they want.
• The ability to launch a customer support program quickly, even when you need thousands of agents ready to support your customers.
• A best-in-class workforce management team and supporting technology to create a centralized organization that can better serve your entire business.

iQor helps brands deliver the world’s most sought-after customer experiences. Interested in learning more about the iQor difference? If you’re ready to start a conversation with a customer experience expert, contact us to learn about how we can help you create more smiles.

Bartosz Golembnik is vice president of IT data sciences at iQor.

Anna Perkowska is a programmer analyst of data sciences at iQor.