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AI Text Analytics for Contact Centers

Transform your customer's experience with the power of data.

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Customers talk to you every single day. You have hundreds, if not thousands, of conversations about your business, products, services, and support. If you listen, you’ll learn everything you need to know to improve your offerings. They’ll tell you, “I’m not happy with this…” “I don’t understand this…” or “I really wish you offered this…” And their expectations are higher than ever before.

It’s an endless supply of insight that you can tap into to build a better business. After all, when you know what your customers need, want, and enjoy, you can provide it. The key is to collect, analyze, and understand exactly what your customers are saying—in their own words.

That’s the power of AI text analytics for customer feedback.

 

What Is Text Analytics? 

Text analytics takes every text interaction with a customer and automatically extracts critical information regarding sentiment, intention, trends, and concept. It then breaks down this important data into actionable insights for a holistic view of the entire customer experience. You’ll come to understand what your customers are saying, how your agents are handling customer requests, and what you can do to improve.

And as long as it’s text you have to analyze, text analytics can be very effective. You can use it on every channel, from live chat to email, call transcripts, to help tickets, and social media. You can even use text analytics on historical text, aggregating the results and creating a repository of information to build predictive models for successful business operations in the future.

Best yet, text analytics isn’t limited just to customer support and the contact center. Insight can be used by other departments as well—marketing, sales, IT, and product For example, marketing might use the software to track the success of a new promotion code while IT tracks the release of a website update and R&D tracks customer response to a new product. 

Types of Text Analytics

But not all text analytics software is the same or offers the same benefits. Text analytics is typically broken down into three main types:

types-of-text-analytics-scorebuddy

Descriptive Analytics: Gathers data from unstructured text to identify conversational themes and trends for a clearer picture of customer satisfaction, purchasing habits, and support issues over time.

Predictive Analytics: Forecasts future events by interpreting text and making recommendations for keeping up with demand and trends.

Prescriptive Analytics: Teaches you how and why your customers engage with your products to create contingency plans for specific future outcomes.

 

Depending on your company’s needs, one type of analytics may be better suited for you than another. But no matter which you choose, they all work in a similar way—reading, analyzing and interpreting the text to provide insight into your customers and their interactions with your business.

Learn How to Overcome-Call-Center-CX-Challenges

How Does Text Analytics Work?

Using real-time analysis, text analytics identifies, extracts, and filters unstructured text. It then transforms that data into a readable format. From there, text mining digs deeper into every conversation to pull out essential keywords, phrases, and context. With that knowledge, you can take actions within your contact center and beyond. 

To simplify, let’s break down text analytics into just four steps:

how-does-text-analytics-works-scorebuddy

Step 1: Text analytics reads 100% of unstructured (open/free) text available through customer surveys, chats, support tickets, social media, email, voice transcripts, etc. 

Step 2: Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing then automatically analyze this text to detect keywords, relationships between words, problems, emotions, intentions, preferences, etc.

Step 3: The text analytics software determines sentiment and what the interaction is about—product mentioned, problem reported, question asked, etc.—in order to categorize each conversation appropriately.

For example, the software might gather all conversations that include the phrase “payment problem PayPal,” “promo code 1234,” “shipping costs,” and “customer support help.”

Step 4: These new categories and metrics are applied to the entire database of customer conversations so that, in time, you can trend them, correlate them, prioritize them, detect root causes, and understand friction drivers.

And since all four steps happen automatically, integrating text analytics into your current QA solution and workflow is a relatively straightforward matter. It should integrate seamlessly.

Text Analytics Workflow

Let’s take a look at the normal workflow of a contact center manager trying to answer the question, “How often do people complain about X?” 

Without text analytics, she would have to ask agents to manually go through their conversations and track when “X” was brought up by customers. Or she might have to ask for an estimate of its use based on memory. Or she might rely on agents correctly categorizing all help tickets manually, which is cumbersome and unreliable.

With text analytics, answering the question becomes much easier. The contact center manager can simply open the software and look at all comments about “X” by performing a simple search. She can then pull-out snippets around the keyword for a fuller understanding of the context. Then, in just a few clicks, text analytics offers a full analysis of the complaint alongside examples and trends—all in one shareable report.

What Is Text Analytics? 

Text analytics takes every text interaction with a customer and automatically extracts critical information regarding sentiment, intention, trends, and concept. It then breaks down this important data into actionable insights for a holistic view of the entire customer experience. You’ll come to understand what your customers are saying, how your agents are handling customer requests, and what you can do to improve.

And as long as it’s text you have to analyze, text analytics can be very effective. You can use it on every channel, from live chat to email, call transcripts, to help tickets, and social media. You can even use text analytics on historical text, aggregating the results and creating a repository of information to build predictive models for successful business operations in the future.

Best yet, text analytics isn’t limited just to customer support and the contact center. Insight can be used by other departments as well—marketing, sales, IT, and product For example, marketing might use the software to track the success of a new promotion code while IT tracks the release of a website update and R&D tracks customer response to a new product. 

Types of Text Analytics

But not all text analytics software is the same or offers the same benefits. Text analytics is typically broken down into three main types:

types-of-text-analytics-scorebuddy

Descriptive Analytics: Gathers data from unstructured text to identify conversational themes and trends for a clearer picture of customer satisfaction, purchasing habits, and support issues over time.

Predictive Analytics: Forecasts future events by interpreting text and making recommendations for keeping up with demand and trends.

Prescriptive Analytics: Teaches you how and why your customers engage with your products to create contingency plans for specific future outcomes.

 

Depending on your company’s needs, one type of analytics may be better suited for you than another. But no matter which you choose, they all work in a similar way—reading, analyzing and interpreting the text to provide insight into your customers and their interactions with your business.

Learn How to Overcome-Call-Center-CX-Challenges

How Does Text Analytics Work? 

So, how exactly does text analytics work? Using real-time analysis, text analytics identifies, extracts, and filters unstructured text. It then transforms that data into a readable format. From there, text mining digs deeper into every conversation to pull out essential keywords, phrases, and context. With that knowledge, you can take actions within your contact center and beyond. 

To simplify, let’s break down text analytics into just four steps:

how-does-text-analytics-works-scorebuddy

Step 1: Text analytics reads 100% of unstructured (open/free) text available through customer surveys, chats, support tickets, social media, email, voice transcripts, etc. 

Step 2: Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing then automatically analyze this text to detect keywords, relationships between words, problems, emotions, intentions, preferences, etc.

Step 3: The text analytics software determines sentiment and what the interaction is about—product mentioned, problem reported, question asked, etc.—in order to categorize each conversation appropriately.

For example, the software might gather all conversations that include the phrase “payment problem PayPal,” “promo code 1234,” “shipping costs,” and “customer support help.”

Step 4: These new categories and metrics are applied to the entire database of customer conversations so that, in time, you can trend them, correlate them, prioritize them, detect root causes, and understand friction drivers.

And since all four steps happen automatically, integrating text analytics into your current QA solution and workflow is a relatively straightforward matter. It should integrate seamlessly.

Text Analytics Workflow

Let’s take a look at the normal workflow of a contact center manager trying to answer the question, “How often do people complain about X?” 

Without text analytics, she would have to ask agents to manually go through their conversations and track when “X” was brought up by customers. Or she might have to ask for an estimate of its use based on memory. Or she might rely on agents correctly categorizing all help tickets manually, which is cumbersome and unreliable.

With text analytics, answering the question becomes much easier. The contact center manager can simply open the software and look at all comments about “X” by performing a simple search. She can then pull-out snippets around the keyword for a fuller understanding of the context. Then, in just a few clicks, text analytics offers a full analysis of the complaint alongside examples and trends—all in one shareable report.

Now that you understand what text analytics is, how it works, and why you need it, let’s talk about actually implementing it into your contact center. What direct pain points can text analytics solve for your contact center agents and managers? A lot more than you might think.

There are eleven common use cases for text analytics in the contact center.

1. Discover What Matters to Your Customers

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Why do your customers contact you? Do you know their pain points, what they need, what they like, and what questions they have? To get to the root of your customer support issues, you have to analyze every single interaction and pull-out trends. That’s what text analytics can do.

Using AI, text analytics automatically analyzes everything your customers are saying. You’ll then be presented with a list of keywords, phrases, and sentiments (positive and negative) to broaden your understanding of what your customers are saying. From there, you can draw data-based conclusions about what matters most to your customers.

You can look back on past conversations and track customer interaction history to see if/when a particular issue occurred. This solves a big weakness of manual categorization. With text analytics, it doesn’t matter if an issue was closed. You can still historically analyze the problem and monitor the solution going forward. 

2. Detect Revenue Impacting Problems

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“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But what if it is broken? How do you quickly detect when something is a problem that’s costing you money? With text analytics, you can rapidly detect revenue-impacting problems such as promo codes not working, payment gateway issues, website malfunctions, etc. 

You don’t have to pick and choose which customer support tickets to read and analyze. Instead, you can analyze hundreds of thousands of support tickets at once to reveal revenue-impacting problems. From there, you can deep dive into the problem tickets to quickly determine exactly what the problem is and how to fix it.

If it’s a common user error, you can report the problem to your marketing team to improve UX and decrease the issue. If it’s a broken payment gateway, you can alert IT and fix the back end. If it’s an agent training issue, you can alert supervisors about the knowledge gaps.

3. Track Specific Issues as They Appear and Until They Are Solved

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Now, let’s say you have a known problem with printing, and you want to track exactly what issues your customers are experiencing. You can assign “printing” as a topic to track in text analytics. From there, you can track when it increases in frequency, what exactly is being said in context, and when the issue finally disappears (is resolved).

And the issue can be as specific or general as you want. For example, you can track something as general as “payment failed,” or you can be as specific as “promo code 1234.” Text analytics will gather all instances of these keywords, including associated sentiment, so you can keep on top of exactly what is happening and how directly it impacts customer satisfaction. You can even set up tracking for future issues and potential problems, such as upon the release of a product update or for an upcoming sales promotion. 

4. Detect Trending Topics, Questions, and Complaints

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There are always two approaches to text analytics. 

(1)  You can configure text analytics to monitor a specific keyword and then track it (as we explained above). For example, you can track people talking about “payment failed” and associate the responses for your queries. 

But what if you don’t know what you’re looking for? How can you uncover what’s trending when you don’t know where to start?

(2)  Text analytics can tell you what you should be looking for. Without any input from you, it will pull out trending keywords to alert you to popular topics, new issues, and common complaints. This happens without your supervision and is a great way to keep a pulse on your customers.

5. Get Alerts on Regulatory Problems

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What about those big issues? We’re talking about compliance issues, website crashes, significant code errors, nails in food, asking a customer for private data, etc. When it comes to the big issues that could shut your company’s doors, it doesn’t matter how often they occur. Even once is too much because their importance is so significant.

If you are manually monitoring customer support, these types of problems could slip through the cracks. You’re relying on your contact center agents to recognize the severity of the situation and to report the issue to the right manager. But with text analytics,  AI is trained to automatically search for these kinds of issues and send alerts as they happen. This helps you reduce compliance, regulatory, and legal risk.

6. Prioritize and Allocate Backlogged Tickets

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Even the best contact centers can have trouble keeping up with customer demand. If you have a long list of backlogged tickets that have not been looked at by any agents yet, the queue can feel overwhelming. You may not know what to open first or how to prioritize tickets. 

This is a big use case for text analytics. The software can classify tickets in the waiting queue, helping you prioritize and route customer inquiries based on assigned criteria. You can prioritize by keyword, topic, sentiment, high frustration, regulatory words, and more. Then, you can assign each ticket to the agent best trained to answer the customer’s needs.

 

7. Complete Root Cause Analysis of Problems

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Let us assume you uncover a problem that’s trending up—a payment problem—what do you do with it? You escalate it to the website team, but then they come back to you and want more information. They want to know exactly what people are saying, so they can figure out where the error is and fix it. 

With text analytics, you can delve into the problem, correlate it with context, and determine exactly what the issue is. You can then share this information with IT, and they can implement the adjustments needed.

 

Root cause analysis is also important for personalized coaching and training. When you are able to break down every text interaction by topic and issue, it becomes clearer how your agents are performing and where there are knowledge gaps. From there, you can focus your efforts on:

  • the customer issues that take the most time, 
  • tickets where sentiment leans negative,
  • queries that have the most repeats, 
  • and issues where customer satisfaction is at risk.

8. Improve Self-Service Capabilities

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Customers prefer knowledge bases over all other self-service channels. But unless you review every customer support ticket, email, and live chat, you might miss common questions that would be better served by a Knowledge Base rather than your agents. You can improve self-service capabilities with better FAQs and bots with text analytics.

AI text analytics automatically tags and divides every text-based interaction into common topics. From there, you can delve into high-volume queries and create FAQs based on that insight. This Knowledge Base—both internal and external—can be used to more quickly resolve issues, fill in any information gaps, and increase customer satisfaction.

Not only will this save your agents time, but you’ll also ensure that your customers have the material they need to help themselves.

9. Gain Unsolicited Customer Feedback

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Your contact center receives feedback on everything from specific product/service frictions to issues related to bugs. And you already know what features your customers love and can’t live without. With text analytics, your contact center can become the epicenter for unsolicited customer feedback for all your products and services. 

This means your contact center will play a critical role in taking design and development to the next level and giving your product teams what they need to be successful.

10. Detect Customer Satisfaction Levels

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Are your customers happy with your contact center service? Do they feel satisfied after dealing with you? Are they generally angry, annoyed, frustrated, upset, happy, or anxious after dealing with your agents? You need to know if your customers feel positively or negatively about their interactions with you. And that’s what text analytics offers.

You can analyze all text conversations and highlight emotionally-laden words that show how your customers feel about you—positively and negatively. You can even determine how strongly they feel about your products or services. 

This ability to understand your customers’ emotions is what will have the greatest influence on your customer satisfaction levels. You can learn how to adjust your customer support approach to make sure that customers leave their conversations with your agents in a better place than when they started.

11. Complete Quality Assurance Programs

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There are also a number of quality use cases for text analytics. 

The first one is to use text analytics to pick conversations that are worth auditing. Normally, the way that QA managers select conversations is by using a small sample that is relatively random. What text analytics can do is focus on conversations concerning common problems that require more attention. 

For example, let’s say that 22% of customer interactions have to do with the keyword “payment problems.” With text analytics, you won’t have to randomly audit multiple conversations to find one that fits. Instead, you can specifically choose to audit a clearly marked “payment problem” instance to gain better insight. 

You can also pick conversations to monitor for quality, based on friction. Let’s say there’s a trending topic, “cannot print.” With text analytics, you can connect this phrase to overly long conversations that take a lot of agent time and energy. What this may mean is that more training is needed, IT needs to get involved, or print issues are multi-faceted and are always brought up in conjunction with something else. Whatever the case, that knowledge is power in the hands of your QA managers.

Lastly, you can use text analytics in conjunction with self-scorecards and learning management systems to complement your overall QA program. You can match up scorecard insight with text analytics trends to see if agent opinions align with customer opinions. And you can craft new training programs and courses based on trending problems as highlighted by text analytics.

How Text Analytics Helps You Meet Overall Business Goals 

Text analytics isn’t just valuable for the contact center. When used correctly, text analytics software provides pivotal information for almost every department: quality assurance, sales, product development, marketing, IT, and customer service. Here’s exactly what’s at stake for companies that rely on text analytics to make an impact.

Better Understanding of Customer Activity Drivers Across Departments

As we’ve already hinted at a few times above, understanding customers is not just for call centers. With text analytics, the call center becomes the hub of customer information that can then be shared with every department in your company. And each department—Marketing, Sales, IT, and Product—can keep track of the customer activity most important to them and most necessary for improvement. 

For example:

  • Marketing can track customers talking about a new promo code, a social media advertisement, a TV commercial, an email blast, and more.

  • The Product Team can track the product and service updates, new releases, product sales, and various product feedback.

  • Sales can track customer satisfaction with sales packages, discounts, shipping costs, and more.

  • IT can track a new landing page releases, shopping cart abandonment, website UX, app use, etc.

It’s about giving your call center the ability to review all customer interactions to find out what exactly is driving activity based on trending keywords, phrases, topics, and sentiment. You’ll understand common problems, rising concerns, potential issues, and areas from satisfaction. And then, from there, you can disseminate that information to each department so they can figure out what can be done to improve and what they’re already doing well. 

Improve Training and Onboarding for HR and QA

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Where do your employees fail and succeed in their duties to your customers? Are there any knowledge gaps that impact your revenue generation? With text analytics, your HR and QA teams can detect training opportunities and root causes with one-click drill-downs. 

By auditing conversations—selectively and as a whole—management can quickly and easily find areas of friction, uncover star-performing employees, and reveal knowledge that is lacking. From there, HR can come up with an appropriate onboarding process and continuous training while QA finds the common topics, problems, and complaints that require additional focus. 

Bottom line, text analytics provides insight into known and unknown improvement opportunities based on real-time data.

Gain Critical Feedback on Products and Services for Product and Sales Teams

Customers come to contact centers with feedback on features, new product questions, bug fixes, and more. It’s information that’s often missing from customer surveys—which only 10% of customers actually respond to in any case. With text analytics, your product and sales teams gain insight into what your customers actually care about in their own words. 

Through AI and language processing, every support ticket, email, and chat message becomes a product and services roadmap to success. Text analytics highlights even the subtlest feedback so you can improve features and debug issues based on your customers’ priority. It’s an easy way to take your R&D to the next level.

Track Marketing and Messaging Success

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Insight into text data can inform your marketing team about the success of their discounts, specials, and promotions. Across channels, they can track keywords and phrases—such as “promo code 1234” or “summer special”—to see if customers are aware and interacting with what they’re offering. 

With text analytics, marketing can easily and quickly calculate the cost and benefits of their messaging. From there, they can make judgment calls about their outreach efforts and make adjustments as needed.

 

Uncover Website and UX Issues for IT Teams

IT teams can use text analytics to make customer-centric design a priority. They can perform A/B testing combined with customer feedback to see what works well, what needs work, and how best to present information. It’s all about making the best website and UX possible.

Best of all, they can use text analytics to track known issues by keyword to see if the fix provided was successful. It’s valuable insight for everything from payment systems to homepage navigation, customer engagement, and shopping cart abandonment. 

Call Center Training Tips

Once you have a learning management system in place, the call center training materials you need, and you’ve hired the right call center trainer, now what? If you want to provide your customers with the experience they expect and deserve, you need to implement our call center training tips.

These tips cover everything from soft skills training to compliance training, sales training, technology training, engaging training, and remote training. It’s all about giving your agents the development opportunities they need to achieve their full potential.

Soft Skills Training Tips

Soft skills are one of the foremost predictors of employee success and performance. According to research, 85% of long-term job success depends on soft skills, while only 25% rely on technical knowledge. That’s because soft skills are complex to master and essential for interacting and communicating at all levels.

The key to soft skills training for call center agents is to first identify the soft skills most critical to success. Then, once you identify those skills and characteristics, you have to create a soft skills training plan.

What are Soft Skills?

When figuring out agent soft skills, you have to look at those innate characteristics that are most critical for quality customer service. You also need to look at those factors that are responsible for creating engaged agents who communicate well. This is in contrast to “hard skills,” which more directly relate to call center agent knowledge—such as operating a computer.

So, what soft skills do your call center agents need most? It highly depends on the role of your call center, the culture of your workplace, and the needs of your customers. However, there are a few overarching soft skills that almost every call center agent needs.

Soft skills training for call center agents should include the ability to:

  • Communicate: Call center agents spend most of their time talking to people. They need to be able to discuss complex information and present the company’s core message.
  • Learn: Agents need to be able to learn new scripts, products, and technology.
  • Demonstrate Empathy/Emotional Intelligence: Agents must be able to empathize with customers, understand emotional cues, and diffuse difficult situations that are emotionally charged.
  • Meet Goals: Call centers are numbers-driven, and agents need to be able to internalize goals to meet or exceed them.
  • Work in a Structured Environment: Agents must be able to handle routine on a daily basis and not be challenged by a lack of creativity.
  • Find Answers: Agents cannot always stick to scripts; they must be able to ask questions and find answers to accomplish their objectives.
  • Be Flexible: Agents must be able to react appropriately in any given situation; it’s all about adaptability.
  • Problem Solve: Your agents must be able to think critically to solve problems and resolve conflicts.

Tips for Soft Skills Training for Call Center Agents

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Soft skills training for call center agents doesn’t just magically happen. You have to create a development plan that lays the groundwork for soft skills training. Here are a few tips to help you get started.

  1. Take a Blended-Learning Approach: Both self-study and LIVE training are critical to learning soft skills. With self-study, your call center agents can slowly learn soft skills through videos, articles, and interactive quizzes that they can complete on their schedule. With LIVE training, agents have an opportunity to put their soft skills to the test with immediate feedback, role-playing, and group practice.
  2. Create a Clear Soft Skills Training Structure: Make learning soft skills feel valuable and desirable by presenting it as a way to grow, not something that’s remedial. Learning soft skills needs to be seen as beneficial, or agents will feel patronized.
  3. Evaluate Each Agent: Not every agent will need the same soft skills training program. Create individual learning goals and track progress through an LMS.
  4. Set Call Center Goals: There will be trends within the call center that reveal critical soft skills. Match your soft skills training for call center agents up with these overarching goals, so your efforts match up to actual improvement.
  5. Provide Time for Reflection: Self-reflection is critical for soft skills training. Agents need time to process what they learn and apply it to their daily activities.

6.Implement Regular Soft Skills Exercises: To learn soft skills, agents need the opportunity to practice what they learn in a safe and forgiving environment. Encourage role-playing and discussions on a monthly basis.

 

Call Center Compliance Training

Call center regulatory compliance can impact every level of your business. Customer privacy and data safety concerns everyone. And since your call center exchanges sensitive information thousands of times a day, compliance is critical to not just your success but your company’s continued existence.

Unfortunately, few call centers are correctly set up to handle all of your regulatory compliance concerns. In fact, according to a survey by NICE, 99% of organizations admit they could improve their compliance tools and software, and 96% admit their IT teams face challenges when it comes to contact center compliance.

The good news is that you can make call center compliance a high priority with the right systems and training in place.

The Importance of Compliance Training

First, let’s take a look at the importance of call center compliance training. Without it, you leave your company open to financial and reputational risks in the form of fines and data breaches. For telemarketing company Infocision, a lack of compliance resulted in a $250,000 fine by the Federal Trade Association.

And they’re not alone. A ten-year-long research study conducted by Verizon revealed that no company is fully PCI DDS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliant. What this means is that most organizations are vulnerable to data breaches and financial attacks that can cost, on average, $4 million.

So while many contact centers strive to be compliant, they typically do not have the necessary stringent policies and procedures in place to protect them on every level. That’s where call center compliance training comes into play.

Tips for Call Center Compliance Training

To help your call center meet regulatory compliance standards, there are quite a few things that your company needs to keep in mind.

  • Know All Call Center Compliance and Regulatory Mandates: Your call center must embrace compliance standards beyond PCI, and those standards can vary greatly depending on your industry. A few regulations to consider include:
  • Call Monitoring Consent
  • Fair Debt Collection Practice Act
  • Do Not Call Registry
  • General Data Protection Regulation
  • Truth in Lending Act
  • Dodd-Frank Act
  • Sarbanes-Oxley Act
  • HIPAA
  • Equal Credit Opportunity Act
  • Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
  • Implement Regulatory Compliance Tools and Software: To ensure call center compliance, implement tools such as call recording software and QA scorecards. These tools will help you look for at-risk situations, meet regulatory standards, and deal with any breaches immediately.
  • Create a Vulnerability Management and Information Security Policy: This program will outline the key elements of regulatory compliance that need to be communicated in your call center compliance training. It should cover everything, including:
  • How your company keeps sensitive information stored behind robust firewalls.
  • How call center agents are allowed to record customer information—with encrypted systems and not written down on paper.
  • How your software and applications are protected by anti-virus software.
  • When, why, and how agents are allowed to access cardholder information.
  • The type of language agents must use (calm and nonviolent) when speaking to customers.
  • When and how to gain customer consent during interactions.

The key to effective call center compliance training is to take into account the unique nature of your company. Your employees need to clearly understand all of your compliance and security policies and go into every customer interaction with security as their top priority.

If you can get the importance of compliance across to your agents, you can protect your valuable data, address any privacy concerns, and spot compliance errors as they happen.

Call Center Inbound Sales Training

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Call center training doesn’t begin and end with quality customer service. While that is one of the most visible ways to stand out as a brand, the next step is to transform outstanding customer experience (CX) into sales.

Best-in-class call centers focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences and driving more sales. It’s about gaining the greatest lifetime value from your customers and uncovering their vast revenue potential.

Happy customers are more likely to make a purchase and pay more for that purchase, so call center inbound sales training that focuses on the buyer journey is critical.

Why All Agents Should be Trained in Sales

To drive sales and increase revenue, your call center agents have to go above and beyond helping customers. They have to also be great sales representatives that create “WOW moments” to inspire customer trust and customer satisfaction.

If you build a team of call center agents that are trained in sales, you can learn to provide true value during every customer interaction. With just a few small adjustments, your call center can be used to create opportunities to sell customers what they need—upselling products and services to enhance the customer experience. And by having call center inbound sales training, you can reduce friction and make purchasing habitual while assisting customers.

The key is to make customer service and sales inseparable. After all, when someone calls to complain about a product or ask for help, it’s the perfect opportunity to offer sales support. And since your customer service representatives have already built a rapport with customers through problem-solving, adding sales to their job only makes sense.

Tips for Teaching Inbound Sales

So, the question is, how do you teach sales to your call center agents? Is there call center sales training material that you can use to inform your training? Here are a few tips for call center inbound sales training to get you started.

  • Teach Deep Knowledge of Your Products & Services: It’s critical that your call center agents completely understand your products and services. They must be up to date on all you have to offer—able to answer any and all questions, objections, and concerns.
  • Take Charge of the Sales Conversation: Your call center agents should have the confidence to clearly speak about your products and services to bridge the sales gap. They must be able to make on-the-spot decisions to match products and services to the customer’s needs and wants.
  • Focus on Cross-Selling: One of the easiest ways to increase inbound call center sales is to take the opportunity to explain how another of your company’s products or services can alleviate a pain point. Discuss add-ons, support packages, and upgrades to enhance the customer experience.
  • Leverage Personalization: Personalize the sales experience by making product and service recommendations based on the customer’s preferences, behavior, and past interactions. The key is to make the customer feel like their needs are understood.
  • Offer Helpful Recommendations: Sales can be used as an opportunity to offer solutions to a problem. Customers appreciate product recommendations that fit their situation and requirements.
  • Create a Healthy Sales Competition: Sales doesn’t need to be a dog-eat-dog world, but healthy competition among your call center agents is a good idea. Offer commission-based incentives for consistent sales, and offer special prizes for weekly sales winners.

Including call center sales training material isn’t something that happens automatically. But by adapting your customer service representatives to also sell your products and services, you’ll see the increase in revenue you want.

Call Center Technology Training

Call center technology empowers your team to provide exceptional customer support and deliver world-class service. The right software helps you increase productivity, improve agent performance, and better organize and manage customer interactions. However, your call center technology is only effective if it is used correctly.

Unless you develop processes, playbooks, and standardization for implementing and using call center technology, it won’t help you in the way you want or need. The key is to know which call center tools you should use and then set rules for when and how to take advantage of them.

CRM or Service Tickets

Call center customer relationship management (CRM) software is critical to your success. It’s how you provide your agents with access to customer information and history, instantly. And it’s how your agents are able to help customers with relevant and up-to-date insight during every support experience. If you want to provide personalized and real-time customer experiences, you need a CRM.

When it comes to training, you must seamlessly integrate your CRM into your call center processes. Call center technology training should cover how to use the CRM to:

  • Achieve great customer experience across every digital channel.
  • Deliver a personalized customer experience.
  • Gain insight into the customer journey.
  • Review customer information and history immediately.
  • Prioritize work and customer activities.

LMS

Unfortunately, only 65% of companies provide effective tools for training. That’s why using a learning management system (LMS) is essential. A call center LMS is how you automate the training process and simplify how you manage, track, and achieve your learning goals.

To get the most out of your LMS, your agents must be trained on how to use the technology. They should be taught how to:

  • Use the software to enjoy their virtual classroom experience anywhere and at any time.
  • Undergo the onboarding process and complete courses to achieve the skills, knowledge, and resources they need to shine.
  • Adjust their training to their highly specific training goals for a personalized learning experience.
  • Perform routine performance reviews, exams, and assessments to identify learning gaps.
  • Implement gaming mechanics to the learning process for a more fun, interesting, and engaging training experience.
  • Track their training progress through actionable reports and QA metrics.

Self-Scorecards

Agent self-scoring is essential when it comes to employee engagement and performance management. During this process, your call center agents have an opportunity to review their own work, listen to calls, and evaluate their performance. This can have a significant impact on your agents’ understanding and awareness of their personal development.

However, agent self-scorecards only work if your agents know how to evaluate themselves honestly and openly. To do this, you need to make sure that your agents know how to use the scorecards effectively within the QA process.

Your call center technology training should include:

  • Clear quality guidelines so that agents know exactly what is expected of them before they self-score.
  • Management’s role in the self-score process, so that agents feel safe contributing their ideas and strategies.
  • How self-scoring fits within the entire QA framework and is part of the bigger picture.
  • How self-scoring is kept separate from other quality scores for a judgment-free experience.
  • The way that self-scoring will be used within the training and coaching process.

Omni-channel

Call center agents use multiple different channels to communicate with customers. If they are not trained on how to effectively communicate across phone, email, social media, live chat, etc., then the customer experience won’t be exceptional. Your agents must be taught best practices for each channel as well as how to provide an omni-channel experience that doesn’t require customers to repeat their questions across channels.

To ensure you handle your omni-channel support correctly, you need to train your agents to:

  • Recognize customers as they move across channels.
  • Manage, access, and act on omni-channel data in real-time.
  • Collect data from all touch-points and keep it in one location for a consistent customer experience.
  • Deliver consistent and authentic messaging—no matter the channel.
  • Personalize the customer experience via channel-specific customer data.
  • Implement planning and routing strategies to dynamically match customers to the best agent per channel.

Call Tracking Software

To optimize your call center’s performance, you should also implement call center tracking software, such as:

  1. Speech Analytics, which helps you monitor calls in real-time by analyzing tone and sentiment, gauging customer emotion and satisfaction, and gathering data on agent skills and performance.
  2. Text Analytics, which helps you analyze writing in the same way speech analytics measures calls.
  3. Predictive Analytics, which predicts customer behaviors and identifies trends, so you can improve agent effectiveness and enhance the customer experience.

The key is to outline all call center technology training policies and procedures for success. Your call center agents and managers must know when and how to use each piece of technology for the best results.

How to Make Training Fun and Engaging

Employees love training. It’s critical to improving employee retention, employee satisfaction, and long-term employee engagement. There’s just one problem: traditional training is boring.

It’s true! Old-school learning where your employees sit in a room and listen to someone talk at them is snooze-worthy. That's why it’s important to figure out how to make call center training fun and engaging by building creativity into the process.

The good news is that there are two ways to do this: through agent rewards and recognition as well as through training games. Let’s break down what that looks like.

The Importance of Call Center Rewards & Recognition

First and foremost, if you want your training to be effective, you need to set up a program for call center rewards and recognition. Training shouldn’t be about expecting your employees to just “do their jobs.” If you want exceptional performance and agents engaged in training, you have to show your appreciation for their efforts.

According to Gallup, recognition is critical to call center employee engagement and your organization’s overall performance. So, you need to be prepared to comment on, congratulate, and formally recognize your call center agents for a job well done.

Here are some ideas for call center rewards and recognition to get you started.

  • Personalize Agent Rewards and Recognition: Generic, “You did great!” comments aren’t very valuable. Instead, your praise and acknowledgment should directly reflect the individual’s performance and their exceptional work. And make sure to personalize the reward to what the agent would consider valuable if you want them to appreciate it.
  • Celebrate Even Small Successes: If you correct even minor mistakes, then you can celebrate even small successes. Don’t be afraid to regularly give quick and easy praise such as, “You handled that difficult client really well,” or “Thanks for responding to that request so quickly,” or “I appreciate your enthusiasm for training.”
  • Make Your Recognition Public: While private praise and encouragement of your call center agents has its place, so does public recognition. Call out your agents for a job well done during staff meetings, on social channels, in employee newsletters, and beyond.
  • Match Rewards to Success: If you have a five-star agent, give them a five-star prize to match their work. A $5 gift card is not enough for an agent who has really gone above and beyond.
  • Celebrate Risk-Taking, Even if it Fails: If you want your call center agents to be more innovative, you have to accept that failure will happen. Celebrate new ideas and a willingness to take risks and innovate, even if it doesn’t succeed.
  • Get Employee Feedback: Ask employees how they want to be recognized and rewarded for their hard work and success. This can help you create better incentives and improve call center employee engagement.

And remember, it’s not just your top team members that deserve recognition. Your low performers should also be recognized for their improvements—no matter how small. When you are transparent and fair about how and when you recognize achievements within the call center, you’ll encourage every agent to work harder to get a piece of the pie.

Call Center Training Games to Try

Another way to encourage call center employee engagement, especially when it comes to training, is to try out some call center training games. Games offer a great way to foster teamwork, raise energy levels, and encourage skill retention—all while making training more fun.

Gamification can take many formats, including points, badges, levels, and bonuses. But you can also implement call center training games, which might seem trivial, but are a great way to make boring content far more entertaining. Some ideas include:

  • Break the Ice: Give everyone on your team a chance to get to know everyone else with fun ice-breaking ideas.
  • Are You Listening: Test your agents’ abilities to listen by asking a tricky question and tasking your agents with finding the solution.
  • Telephone: Test how well your agents communicate with each other in this classic children’s game.
  • Do You Remember: Test your agents’ ability to remember key facts using small groups and a series of questions.
  • Angry and Happy Customer: Test whether your agents can handle angry and happy customers and how well they do so.
  • Bad Role Play: Teach your agents what not to do by encouraging your agents to role-play the worst way to respond and interact with customers.
  • Charades: Teach your agents about how to communicate better by using charades to demonstrate how much information is missed when body language isn’t available.

Don’t underestimate the power of call center training games for teaching your agents valuable skills. Just make sure the games you use are based on reality and touch on the needs of your call center agents.

Remote Call Center Training Tips

You might be reading this and thinking, “all of these call center training tips sound great, but what happens when it all has to take place remotely? Do these training tips still work in a remote call center?”

The short answer is, “Yes, definitely!” Remote call centers are nothing new. According to Global Workplace Analytics, 50% of people have worked in some type of telecommuting role, and 80-90% would like to work remotely (at least part-time). The key is how you take on the challenges of managing a remote call center and virtual environment.

First, you need to recognize that:

  • It’s more difficult to build relationships without face-to-face interaction.
  • Misunderstandings and miscommunication are more common when working remotely.
  • Virtual team meetings are frustrating and difficult.
  • Observing performance and holding virtual team members accountable is complicated but essential.
  • Matching time zones, schedules, and technologies can be a struggle.
  • It can be difficult to share and receive information in a timely manner in a remote call center.
  • Virtual team members tend to feel disconnected from the office.

So, how do you overcome this? With the RAMP model:

  • Relationships: First, focus on building relationships through trust, conflict management, and enhanced collaboration.
  • Accountability: Establish clear goals for all team members and make sure that individual commitments are met.
  • Motivation: Take time to inspire, influence, and engage every individual on your team.
  • Process: Establish clear processes and effective technology that can be used to build relationships, keep team members accountable, and motivate individuals.

Planning for Uncertain Times

But what if a remote call center isn’t your choice and instead is in response to a crisis—such as COVID-19? There’s no reason to panic. You can come out on the other side of uncertain times without tarnishing your reputation, damaging your operations, negatively impacting your finances, or harming your employees. The key is a carefully crafted crisis communication plan for unexpected emergency situations.

Your crisis communication plan will cover everything you need to continue to provide great customer service and satisfaction within your call center, no matter what’s going on. Your plan should help your remote call center handle any situation with:

  • A succession plan for all executives.
  • A how-to guide for remote work, including using virtual, video, and audio technology.
  • A plan for reducing business to critical operations only.
  • Cross-training for team members for all critical functions.
  • Documentation of all critical processes and procedures.
  • Distribution of call center scripts and agent communications.
  • An outline of who is involved in which actions for every crisis scenario.
  • A resolution plan for each and every type of crisis.

Tips for Training Agents Remotely

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So, the only question is, “How do you keep up agent training in a remote call center?” It’s all about keeping your agents inspired and motivated no matter where they’re working. Virtual or in-person, call center training should be structured in such a way that it improves performance and encourages great customer experiences.

 

Here are a few remote call center training tips to get you started:

  • Put QA Systems in Place: A QA system helps you monitor team and individual performance so that you know where training is needed. This should be the focal point that provides and promotes opportunities for coaching, job adherence, and skill assessment.
  • Provide Autonomy: Remote call center agents don’t need you looking over their shoulders day-in and day-out. Give them the trust and autonomy they need to accomplish their own training goals. A call center LMS is extremely helpful for this.
  • Focus on Relationships: Training shouldn’t only be completed in a virtual classroom with no human interaction. Incorporate instructor-led training and face-to-face video coaching in your remote call center setup.
  • Leverage Technology: Agent performance scorecards and a learning management system can be invaluable tools for tracking the success of your call center training.
  • Provide Regular Feedback and Coaching: Demonstrate your dedication to helping your remote call center agents grow through regular feedback and coaching that motivates them to keep stretching their skills.

The remote call center offers many opportunities for distractions and dissatisfaction. What’s important is to create a sense of purpose through effective and efficient training that’s focused on the individual and the team.

General Agent Training Tips

Now that you know how to deliver soft skills training, call center compliance training, inbound sales training, technology training, fun training, and remote call center training, what about general call center agent training tips? Is there anything that you need to know to immediately improve training and ensure that it gets the results you want?

We’ve already covered most of it, but here are a few additional call center agent training tips to keep in mind.

  • Cross-TrainingCross-training is the most effective method for improving individual and team performance while driving employee efficiency. By training your call center agents in different departments and teams, you up-skill them while boosting morale.
  • Give More Training Time: Providing your call center agents with just 15 more minutes of training per week can have a significant impact on their performance and offer long-lasting career benefits.
  • Perform Gap AnalysisResearch gaps in your agents’ knowledge and skills using quality monitoring and performance reviews. In this way, you can provide training that focuses on legit strengths and weaknesses for better results.
  • Offer Mentoring: Work alongside your agents during the training process by offering mentorship opportunities. Mentors are valuable assets that can help you bring out the best in your call center agents.
  • Use Call Center QA Forms: To provide your agents with balanced feedback about how they’re performing, use call center QA forms to identify trends and areas that are lacking.
  • Focus on Both Personal and Professional Development: Your call center agents have lives outside of your company. Take time to train them in personal development, so they feel nurtured in every way.

 

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Choose the Right Text Analytics Software

At the end of the day, text analytics software is meant to automate and simplify repetitive tasks. It should take work off the plate of your managers and agents by using AI to properly review and analyze every text conversation automatically. The best systems are all about ease-of-use and helpful features.

Here’s what that looks like.

Key Features Needed in Your Text Analytics Software

In general, look for a text analytics solution that prioritizes ease of use, onboarding, accuracy of findings, speed of analytics, and integration with your help desks. This means:

key-features-needed-in-your-text-analytics-software-scorebuddy
  • You shouldn’t need IT teams to use your text analytics solution. Instead, discovery and topic configuration should be available in self-service mode, without requiring a project manager (IT specialist) every time.

  • It should be easy to onboard new users as you add them. And you should have access to help and support when needed to make things better or coach new users.

  • The text analytics data has to be accurate and fast with insight into whatever your particular need is. You should be able to see how often customers mention a specific issue, and in one click, read snippets to understand what works and what doesn’t.

  • It should integrate with your help desk, live chat solution, sales team, etc. Look for integrations with Zendesk, Freshdesk, intercom, Salesforce, LiveChat, Zoho, Slack, Kayako, HubSpot, TeamSupport, etc.

  • The solution should be able to absorb information from multiple sources and draw conclusions that can be shared with other teams and departments as needed.

The whole idea of text analytics is to do away with time-consuming manual tagging and categorization of text. Using AI, it should automatically categorize, and trend contact drivers across hundreds of thousands of customers so you can make better and faster decisions. It’s all about gaining insights you can act on.

That’s why a few other key features your text analytics software needs, include:

  • Real-Time Analysis: A real-time understanding of your text conversations allows you to make immediate improvements and offers alerts when it comes to compliance.

  • Post-Interaction Analysis: After every text interaction, you should be able to perform a detailed analysis to better understand reasons for contact, product mentions, quality assessment, sentiment evolution, intent, and more.

  • Backlog Analysis: You should be able to clear your backlog by prioritizing old tickets based on query type.

  • Out-of-the-box Dashboards: Customizable dashboards should help you keep an eye on the issues that are most relevant to your team at the click of a button.

  • Reporting: Reports should automatically summarize key data from your text interactions with graphs, tables, and more detailed breakdowns.

And to make sure all of these features and capabilities work well, look for rich use cases that show the text analytics software in action. There should be multiple customers who are willing to share how the software impacted their business. Ask for a use case for each of your company’s top priorities.

 

Add Text Analytics to Your Contact Center Today!

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The era of relying only on direct surveys and hoping for answers is over. No longer should you waste time looking at random customer support conversations and trying to uncover important feedback. With text analytics, the customer tells you what’s working and what is not working.

Every department in your business can benefit from unsolicited customer feedback. You can use it to focus your priorities directly on revenue-generating issues. This saves you money, decreases wasted time, increases productivity, improves agent engagement, and enhances customer satisfaction. 

The key is using text analytics to truly understand your customers. When you know what they are saying about your company’s services, products, and support—in their own words—you have a valid starting point driving positive, important, and realistic change. 

At the end of the day, knowledge is power. And text analytics is all about gaining the insight you need to make better business decisions and business improvement.

Learn more about Scorebuddy’s text analytics solution today!

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