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DMG Consulting’s 2021 – 2022 Interaction Analytics Product and Market Report Highlights

DMG Consulting’s 2021 – 2022 Interaction Analytics Product and Market Report, our 16th annual report on this sector, focuses on contact center and service-related uses of interaction analytics (IA). It also covers broader applications of IA throughout the enterprise, including its value in operationalizing the findings from voice-of-the-customer (VoC), customer journey analytics (CJA) and customer experience (CX) solutions. The Report also examines the substantial benefits of embedding IA in third-party applications to enrich their output and findings.  

Interaction analytics has proven its effectiveness in both the best and worst of times. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became an essential application for enterprises, not just contact centers, as it provided insights into customer wants and needs as well as employee performance, data that was unavailable from any other source. The output from IA applications enabled companies to keep their employees safe, sustain the integrity of their brand, adapt to an increasingly digital economy, and remain relevant during a period of unprecedented upheaval and challenges.

Customers expect the companies they do business with to be agile and responsive to their needs. Companies need to gather information about customers’ concerns in order to provide this level of consistently outstanding service. Voice-of-the-customer solutions (otherwise known as surveying) can be used to solicit this data, but there is a risk of survey fatigue if this process is used too often, and there are also times, such as during the pandemic, when it’s inappropriate to ask customers for feedback. Interaction analytics, however, is able to provide these necessary customer insights because it is passive and gathers information without having to ask customers to respond. Deriving vital data from customer interactions has allowed companies to adopt a “customer-first” approach to service, enabling them to pivot to address rapidly changing customer needs.

Enterprises also need data on how well their employees are delivering service on an ongoing basis. Companies need inputs that can be used in the moment to alter outcomes during customer interactions, as well as data from past transactions to help identify patterns and opportunities to improve performance. Interaction analytics is the only application that can provide both real-time and historical information for analysis.

Digital transformation is occurring in companies at an increasing rate, and companies that were putting off the transition to digital service experienced a harsh wake-up call during the pandemic. Customers are expressing a growing preference for digital transactions, particularly self-service, and companies need to be prepared to respond in customers’ digital channels of choice. Interaction analytics is highly beneficial because it can address voice and digital channels. Companies should use IA to gain visibility into what is happening across channels and business units and obtain a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey.

The world of work has also been transformed by the pandemic. Work-at-home (WAH) is here to stay. Competition for agents has become fierce, as digital transformation has expanded the prospective employee pool nationally and even internationally. Interaction analytics addresses this challenge with its ability to understand and analyze voice and digital interactions in multiple languages. It can provide real-time alerts and next-best-action guidance to agents regardless of where they are based. IA also provides visibility and oversight into the performance of remote staff, which is essential for an increasingly geographically dispersed workforce. Interaction analytics can perform automated quality management (AQM), more accurately overseeing agent performance and gathering customer insights than the traditional manual methods of quality management. Together with robotic process automation (RPA) solutions, IA can also be used to audit 100% of financial interactions performed by agents.

Report Highlights:

• Interaction analytics is the best source for important customer and employee insights: Interaction analytics solutions enable companies to alter the outcome of customer conversations, responding in real time, and to passively gather historical data that provides insights into customer wants and needs as well as employee performance. This information is key to enabling a company to be agile in addressing customer expectations for service and for optimizing employee performance in delivering a consistently high-quality customer experience.
• The digital transformation is driving the need for IA solutions: Companies need to be prepared to respond to customers in their channels of choice, which are increasingly digital.  Interaction analytics follows conversations as customers pivot from one channel to another, providing necessary insights into all touchpoints in the customer journey.
• Interaction analytics is driving the quality management process into the future: Interaction analytics can be used to perform automated quality management, which can identify company and customer insights more accurately than traditional manual quality management. This means that it can help determine if agents are doing their jobs properly and are accurately responding to customer needs in all channels.
• Companies will benefit from IA capabilities as they transition to the “new normal” business world: Work-at-home and hybrid workforces have become the norm. Companies need IA to oversee the performance of remote and international employees. Interaction analytics can alert and guide agents to the next best action, regardless of where those employees are located.