Generative AI & CX
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May 15, 2024
Customer conversations hold valuable data about your business, but making sense of this data is a challenge that even the most modern customer service organizations struggle with.
According to Gartner, 84% of customer service leaders believe customer data and analytics are important to achieve organizational objectives. But most lack access to or the ability to process the data and analytics available to them to drive better results.
Manual reviews of customer conversations and incomplete customer insights are holding many organizations back—impossible to have the bandwidth to uncover all of your customer data with limited resources. Reviewing every customer conversation is costly, time-consuming, and often leaves issues unhandled—putting the customer experience on the line.
Thankfully, there’s a better way to uncover and understand customer conversation data. Generative CI technology has evolved to provide deeper, more powerful insights into which levers to pull, allowing you to deliver top-notch experiences for both your customers and your organization.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to identify the blind spots that are holding your business back from developing a higher-performing team and delivering better customer satisfaction. You’ll learn where to focus your attention and how the latest in generative CI can help you transform growth.
Table of Contents
Analyze Every Customer Interaction, But Not Manually
The reality is, Voice of Customer (VoC) and quality teams carry the heavy burden of improving customer service delivery. However, these teams have largely relied on manual call reviews and random sampling to get a pulse check on the state of the business or to uncover the reasons behind one-star reviews and customer churn. They’re overburdened and under-staffed and don’t have the time to listen to calls and play them back—let alone make impactful decisions for your business.
The good news is that with the rapid evolution of generative conversation intelligence, businesses can quickly access 100% of interactions to get an immediate pulse check on key areas of interest—particularly those where they most urgently need to take action. Improving customer service delivery no longer requires reliance on manual call reviews, random samples, or stretching your teams too thin.
What is Generative Conversation Intelligence (GenCI)?
GenCI uses multiple large language models to analyze millions of customer data points at once, enabling business leaders to get robust, AI-generated answers to the reasons behind cancellations, returns, missing orders, and more. GenCI provides a data-backed way to understand why customers churn and how to improve agent behavior, as well as to identify key opportunities to drive revenue or product development.
GenCI for Deeper Visibility in Action
Get a full snapshot of what’s happening in conversations. By extending your ability to analyze more customer interactions, you’ll see the full picture and understand the issues that are arising for customers—all without exhausting your team. For example, you can have insight into what's driving sudden surges in customer inquiries and get ahead of issues before they escalate.
Gather quick trends around sentiment and intent. With 100% coverage of customer interactions, you can keep your finger on the pulse of how customers feel and adapt strategy, improve agent training, and predict future customer behavior along the way. For example, you can gather sentiment insights around promotions or special offers and understand how customers are responding to them.
Understand resolution metrics. Know how well agents or chatbots are resolving customer issues. By providing details on the volume of cases that reach a final resolution, including why customers contacted support—such as for a return, exchange, or missing order—you’ll better understand overall support performance.
Nix The Band-Aid: Get To The Root Cause
When problems arise out of the blue, it can be easy to slap a band-aid on in an effort to resolve things quickly. Maybe it’s issuing a refund or offering a discount to prevent customer churn. And sometimes, without the right analysis, you might miss a problem until it’s already caused negative downstream impacts on your business.
Whether you have a short-term solution or not, understanding the root cause is just as critical to avoid further problems down the road. Getting beyond the symptoms and to the root cause starts with knowing which questions to ask and then diving into the data that will best answer them. Unfortunately, when data is dispersed across spreadsheets and call recordings, it can limit your ability to get to the bottom of critical issues quickly.
While most conversation intelligence platforms centralize data, those built exclusively on GenCI provide a level of depth and accuracy that is unparalleled.
So what’s the difference between conversation intelligence, and GenCI?
Conversation intelligence focuses on understanding human inputs. This technology takes your voice calls and texts, and analyzes them to give you insight into what has been said. But, conversation intelligence requires you, the user, to tell it which topics, themes, and keywords need to be flagged.
GenCI, on the other hand, takes these same data points and is able to surface these categories on its own, telling the user which themes and topics are coming up, in quick, detailed summaries. This is how you get to the root causes of your most pressing business issues faster.
GenAI for Root Cause Analysis in Action
Automatically surface themes and subthemes from conversations. With GenCI, you can drill into specific themes and what your customers are actually saying in conversations. For example, GenCI can help you gather insights into conversations where customer confusion is detected and allow you to drill into themes, such as order management issues, product questions, or payment confusion.
Correlate the volume of interactions with the significance of problems. GenCI tells you what percentage of calls pertain to each customer issue and shows you which specific products are referenced. With this invaluable data about how often specific themes are discussed in customer conversations, you can address problems before they escalate and uncover underlying issues. For example, if generative AI signals that customers are calling in about receiving the wrong products, you would know to look upstream to your ordering software or fulfillment center.
Drill into specific conversations to gather full context. GenCI doesn’t only provide the broad strokes of customer sentiment, it allows you to dive into the details of each conversation, too. With AI-generated transcripts, analysis, and the ability to search for specific terms, you can look into one-off cases or paint a more detailed picture of how your customers feel. For example, if you notice low resolution rates, looking into specific conversations can help you understand which parts of your scripts need to be rewritten or where additional training is needed to provide ideal outcomes for your customers.
Customer Story: How Wine Enthusiast Uncovered a Manufacturing Defect with Echo AI
Using GenCI, Wine Enthusiast can automatically see themes from customer conversations, which helps them make informed business decisions and understand the root causes of customer issues.
When they noticed several customer complaints that could be traced back to a manufacturing defect, they tuned into the problem by drilling into Echo AI data. They quickly discovered a set of products that customers were having issues with and were able to address the problem. They pulled products off shelves that would have cost them time, resources, customer relationships, and money down the road.
“We really lucked out because we’re not usually able to see something like that this clearly and identify we have a manufacturing issue with this specific set of products [...] And we addressed it. We also made it right with those customers. That was one of those moments when thought, ‘I don’t know how we ever would have found that insight out [without EchoAI].’”
—John Burke, Vice President of Customer Experience & Technology, Wine Enthusiast
Extract Insights From Every Channel
Today’s customers communicate with your organization across many different channels. Setting up an effective omnichannel communication strategy is one thing, but what about analyzing the thousands of interactions that come across your email, chat, and more?
This is where analyzing data from more customer conversations plays a key role, such as from customer surveys and reviews, which are often forgotten data sources. Every channel—from chat to surveys and beyond—should be brought into a customer intelligence platform to paint a fuller picture of customer opinions and feedback. By aggregating all of your channels, you can tell a better story and understand your customer experience.
With a broader picture from omnichannel analysis, you can evaluate your customer service performance, identify trends in customer feedback, and better predict business performance. All of this can drive improved agent training, more accurate customer service goals, and informed product or service offering decisions. By directly connecting customer experience with business performance, customer experience goes beyond the frontline and embeds itself in broader parts of the organization, like product, marketing, and growth.
Echo AI, for instance, ingests every customer touchpoint across 20+ customer data sources to generate trends and themes, creating unparalleled customer profiles unmatched by most AI-native CCaaS solutions. While other solutions have focused primarily on voice, chats, and email to garner their insights, Echo AI goes beyond to paint the full customer picture.
In addition to major communications channels—like voice, chat, text, and email—Echo AI also analyzes social media, third party customer reviews, and even survey data, resulting in powerful customer intelligence that can be acted on as learnings are surfaced.
Use GenCI-Driven Sentiment Analysis
In today’s digital-first era, phone-based customer service is slowly being disinvested in. Customer support technologies have evolved from simply connecting humans to using AI to understand, decipher, and analyze customer sentiment across the entire customer journey.
And while sentiment analysis has been around for a long time, GenCI is now revolutionizing the field. With GenCI, businesses can now configure the analysis of positive and negative customer sentiment and transcend basic numerical scores. By interpreting the words, context, and underlying sentiment, this technology offers a more accurate understanding of customer conversations across all channels.
For organizations, this data is a gold mine—the customer is king, after all. So, how do you leverage GenCI in customer sentiment analysis to discover unmet needs?
Sentiment Analysis In Action
Provide coaching to agents or reps with negative sentiment. With a deeper understanding of what your customers feel, you can better empower your team to develop the skills necessary to elevate the entire customer experience. Generative AI can help you identify which agents lack empathy, improve upon scripts, implement new talking points, and better coach your team.
Use examples of positive customer sentiment to highlight effective support or sales talk tracks. Leading by example is powerful, and doing so with data is even more so. With sentiment analysis, you’ll have a direct line of sight into which support and sales talk tracks perform best—and can amplify them across your organization to drive results. Plus, positive customer sentiment is a great opportunity to celebrate your agents, gamify positive sentiment scores, and incentivize good performance and customer satisfaction.
Quickly identify new frustrating issues. Relying on surveys or human agents can result in low response rates or forgetting to report issues. AI-driven sentiment analysis reviews all interactions with astounding accuracy and instantly escalates tickets so they can be addressed and corrected. For example, if specific agents are contributing to negative customer sentiment, generative AI can help you pinpoint who needs support or extra training to prevent churn.
Get Generative Insights to Surface What You Don’t Know
When customer intelligence meets generative insights, magic happens. Platforms natively built on GenCI can surface insights before you even know what to look for—and provide valuable insights on how to approach issues or growth opportunities.
Relying on humans to raise customer interaction insights can take days or weeks to process and surface, while generative customer intelligence presents insights as they arise. With more timely access to customer insights, your team and business can respond faster and with greater confidence that you’re addressing real customer needs. You’ll benefit from fewer blindspots and more opportunities to improve outcomes for your customers, team, and organization.
Without any additional configuration, GenCI will automatically surface detailed information around specific themes, trends, or negative outcomes it analyzes. With in-depth information about the number of conversations and issues arising, you get a detailed picture of an issue without having to comb through conversation transcripts or search for keywords. Information is at your fingertips the moment it is automatically analyzed, removing delays, searches, and blind spots.
For example, GenCI might raise the theme of product efficacy and usage concerns for a supplement and vitamin company. It can provide the number of conversations such issues were raised in, as well as sub-themes discussed, such as compatibility with other medications or concerns about side effects. GenCI automatically surfaces themes it notices and allows you to get ahead of questions, issues, and concerns without having to listen to a single conversation yourself.
Generative Insights in Action
Uncover unknown problems or defects. GenCI can surface important yet unknown insights found in customer conversations, such as customer complaints that signal an issue with a specific product. This in turn can foster stronger trust and loyalty, and proving that your business does listen to customer feedback and responds in a timely manner.
Find reasons customers are going to competitors. Even without configuring specific competitor names, get information about why customers are switching to another brand and with enough context to do something about it. Armed with a deeper understanding of customer preferences, pain points, and competitor advantages, you'll be empowered to make strategic decisions that enhance customer satisfaction.
Get granular on unique business challenges. If unique problems like repeat returns from the same customer are a big issue, generative insights can give you an in-depth look into who these customers are, and what is driving repeat behaviors. With custom models, businesses can analyze intent signals that are unique to their business and gain a deeper understanding of customer behaviors.
Learn More
The answers to your pressing CX problems are likely hiding in plain sight, but you lack the resources or technology to find them. With GenCI, you can get answers to pressing questions faster than ever before, improving the customer experience
Echo AI is a GenCI platform that ensures every customer conversation, across all channels, is used to rapidly find key perishable insights and link them to promotions or retention campaigns while automatically scoring agent performance.
Book a demo and turn conversations into insights.
