Home > Columns

Calabrio Analytics Offers Triple Threat Capabilities for Building the Bottom Line

When it comes to increasing profitability in the contact center environment and achieving ROI on technology investments, there are usually three key areas of focus:

- Driving down operating costs by lowering call volume

- Boosting customer satisfaction and NPS by uncovering root causes of customer unhappiness

- Mitigating risk by ensuring adherence to compliance regulations.

Calabrio’s Analytics incorporates sophisticated speech, desktop and text analytics to help drive tangible improvements tailored to the specific needs of individual clients.  According to Tammy Marinac, Product Marketing Manager for Calabrio, the process begins by determining the goals of the organization. “We work with them to confirm the issues they want to address; whether it’s creating better customer perception, decreasing the number of repetitive calls or gaining a lasting competitive advantage.”

With 80% of operating costs in contact centers attributed to labor, the amount of time spent on avoidable inbound calls and escalations can mount up quickly. Analytics can identify and get to the root cause of calls for businesses that were previously unable to determine them. “In one company, 17% of calls were being driven by requests to change passwords,” said Marinac. “With that information in hand, the company was able to make simple changes to their website so that customers could easily find password change instructions. And the company immediately drove down the volume of these inquiries to no more than 5%. This is an example of how analytics can 'tell users what they don’t know' and allow them to make business decisions that produce tangible results.”

Calabrio’s solution offers tools beyond just speech analytics. Speech-to-text transcription and text analytics, for example, enables organizations to capture customer data from every interaction--including email and agent chat sessions--and transform the structured and unstructured data into usable information. It also provides desktop analytics, which can play a critical role in reducing costs by identifying areas of improvement in agent training and processes. “Companies can see exactly what is happening on agents’ screens during the phone call. They can identify phrases like ‘the system is slow’ or ‘give me a second’ to find out whether there is a technical problem or whether the agent is stalling because they’re not sure of the next step – or because they’re simply watching YouTube. By combining speech and text with desktop analytics, organizations have the power to uncover the true causes of  slowdowns, and then take the appropriate measures to correct them.” In one company where the average cost of a call was $4.19, reducing call duration by just 2% drove an annual savings of close to $200,000.

Repeat calls are another major problem for businesses, both in terms of time and customer satisfaction. “Customer satisfaction can drop as much as 15% every time a person has to call back,” noted Marinac. A Calabrio dashboard on First Call Resolution (FCR) can reveal how many times common phrases like ‘I called before,’ ‘I called yesterday,’ and ‘I’m getting tired of this’ are being used. This can help companies then get to the root of why issues are not being resolved the first time around. 

While every organization can put Calabrio Analytics to work right out of the box, others leverage the expertise of the Calabrio Innovation Center, an in-house group focused solely on post-sales customer success, to design customized solutions. The Innovation Center is tasked with making sure that customers realize the full business value from Calabrio Analytics. “They work with customers not from an application training perspective, but from a solution optimization perspective,” said Marinac. “The Innovation Center offers both paid and free services designed to maximize the value customers see from analytics. Our team of experts help them identify best practices for using analytics in their specific industry. As they go forward, they can do things like monthly tuning, phrase checks and business analysis to help make sure they are meeting their goals.”

For example, one cable company worked with the Innovation Center to drill deeper into a wave of repeat calls. With its help in identifying common elements of these calls, they were able to determine that their new billing system was misapplying credits that had been promised to customers and causing frustration by sending bills that had not been adjusted. As soon as the company unearthed the cause, they were able to proactively contact customers to let them know that they were aware of the problem and in the process of correcting it. This immediately drove a 20% reduction in repeat calls and a corresponding increase in CSAT.

The Calabrio Innovation Center also helps companies build useful dashboards to help them visualize KPIs around things like escalations. Customized reports and dashboards show organizations the circumstances under which key phrases like “speak to a supervisor’ are showing up in customer conversations. This type of report allowed one wireless company to learn that its customers were being bombarded with emails telling them they needed to pick up their mobile phones even though they had already done so – all because store managers had not been properly trained on how to close out orders. The insight allowed the business to quickly re-train store managers – and then see an immediate 13% reduction in escalations and an ultimate savings of $400,000 in operational expenses.

Organizations can also use Calabrio Analytics to monitor customer satisfaction trends via its fully automated Sentiment Analysis tool -  an out-of-the-box feature that detects, extracts, and classifies sentiment for every voice-transcribed customer interaction. It spots trends, uncovers root causes of discontent and helps drive vital business decisions. “It was built by a team of our in-house engineers using machine learning, not just to identify key word and phrases, but to provide holistic analysis of the sentiment surrounding a call. Our customers are using Sentiment Analysis to send their QM evaluators down the right path, to enhance their sales, to improve their marketing, and to evaluate product success. And they’re doing all of this without manual intervention and with data that can easily be pulled into their existing reports or analysis."

While Sentiment Analysis provides the user with pre-built reports and dashboards, the tool is customizable, so organizations can tailor it to look at things like sentiment by product line, sentiment by day of the week, or sentiment as it correlates to hold time. The tool detects negation, so it understands that the statements ‘that was a terrible response’ and ‘I did not love that response’ should both be classified as negative. Other tools will focus on a specific word or phrase and miss the true meaning.” The Calabrio tool is accurate in any vertical because its model was built specifically to work within the contact center. The model understands that while most customers are calling in with problems that needs resolving, they’re not necessarily dissatisfied customers. The tool offers, according to Marinac, what Calabrio believes to be unrivaled accuracy, coming up ahead of solutions such as IBM Watson, VADER, and TextBlob Sentiment Analysis in benchmarked studies. The tool can also be leveraged to augment the analysis done with Calabrio’s Predictive NPS and Predictive Evaluations tools to deliver a comprehensive view of customer satisfaction. 

Compliance is another area in which Calabrio Analytics can make a measurable difference, whether it is to ensure compliance with government regulations or to simply confirm that agents are adhering to their scripts. One contact lens retailer used Calabrio Analytics to track compliance with consumer and industry regulations, utilizing speech, text and desktop analytics to ensure that when someone orders contacts that the prescription has been verified. The solution resulted in not only the prevention of serious fines but also a streamlined process that improved speed of delivery for their customers.

Calabrio Analytics can also be used to improve employee engagement. One company created their own gamification program: a large “bingo” card they referred to as “Calabingo,” which relied upon Calabrio Analytics to ensure agents were using the right words and phrases for specific types of sales interactions. The company created reports to show agent success by product line, customer vertical, and type of promotion, and shared ongoing results to inspire healthy competition among agents. Successful agent received prizes and the opportunity to share their best phone calls with the rest of the team right within Calabrio ONE. “This is an example of how organizations can inspire healthy competition as well as increase their sales and customer satisfaction levels – all with one tool,” said Marinac.