Dave Rennyson is President and Chief Executive Officer of SuccessKPI.
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Silent signals from customers are like whispers in a crowded contact center—often overlooked but laden with meaning. Customers may not always explicitly express their needs or intentions, but nonverbal cues can reveal valuable insights. Let’s decode these subtle messages and explore strategies and tactics to enhance the customer experience (CX).
When Steve Jobs launched the Apple Store in 2001, it served as the front door for a reinvigorated customer experience and engagement with what would become an impressive run of new product rollouts. He knew Apple products looked great and needed people to see them. So, he built a store to create an immersive product experience. It was unlike any other retail store at the time and changed retail in many ways.
As CEO, you could consume your company’s content in a few hours exactly the way your customers would—going through the front door—and visiting your website.
But what if you wanted to actively listen to all the conversations handled by your customer service department or enterprise contact center and feel, see and experience them like a customer would on your website? It would be impossible.
Let’s take a thousand-agent contact center as a reference point. If each agent handles one thousand calls a month, that is one million conversations a month. If these conversations roughly average five minutes each, that is five million minutes of conversations per month. That means it would take you 80,000 hours—or 40 years—to fully experience just one month of customer experience. And even that is ambitious. Most contact centers only monitor 1% of conversations.
This leaves deafeningly silent signals that go undetected. You simply cannot “see” these silent signals over the phone, and if they are in the form of sentiment, you cannot “feel” them in the language or the vernacular. It is not just what was heard by CX reps that is important, but what was felt. So, how can we decipher all this? Fortunately, there is a powerful new opportunity to leverage AI and machine learning technology to listen to these calls for you—all the calls, all the time.
At this stage in its development, of course, AI is young, like a well-behaved seven-year-old (with a library card...). We are not quite ready to trust it to single-handedly decide whether your customer conversations are going well. But if you curate it and work with it in a systematic way, you can teach the machine to listen for the right things, to understand them in context and to expand the power of your quality management efforts for full contact center coverage at a fraction of the time and cost of human energy.
We call this “curated AI” or “orchestrated AI and ML” to attack this problem of measuring, managing and getting a good feel for the sentiment, content and efficacy of your customer conversations. In other words, we have the right technology. Let’s use it safely and effectively to exceed the limits of human performance.
Speed And Quality Of Service Both Count
So, what should we track? For starters, speed. When it comes to customer service, most customers want to get through it as quickly as possible.
Gallup Organization research found 20 years ago that if the CX is good enough to please customers and tell others about it, speed cannot come at the expense of a thorough experience. This rings true today even more after decades of advances in technology.
Further, a CX study reported by Retail Dive revealed that the top reason customers abandon a brand is because of low-quality customer service. The study also found that nearly half will then ghost the brand without saying why they left.
So, while timely service is important, quality service is what keeps customers coming back. But there are other items that are easily machine trackable that can be observed with automated quality management:
Customers Remember Your Brand Experience If You Show You Know Them
Brain activation research has shown that people love hearing their own name more than anything else. The implications of this have been seen across a variety of situations when dealing with customers.
1. Using a customer’s name multiple times in a conversation—to an extent—is a sign of familiarity and respect.
2. Multi-channel contact, regardless of the channel, is more effective when the customer’s name is used in the conversation.
3. The agent is perceived to be more competent and viewed in a more positive light, leveraging the halo effect if they demonstrate familiarity and know the customer’s name.
You Are Not Hearing From Your Most Dissatisfied Customers
Missing silent signals can be devastating—one in three customers leave brands after a single bad experience. While the majority of businesses collect customer feedback through direct methods like surveys, social media reviews and other customer feedback loops, they still aren’t hearing from most of their unhappy clients who typically leave without an explanation. Decoding this silent majority will help businesses gain insights that could transform their CX.
Strategies For Detecting Silent Customer Feedback
With the ability to gather and analyze vast amounts of customer data with tools like AI-driven analytics, sentiment analysis and machine learning, companies can detect subtle yet critical signals across the customer journey. By identifying patterns and correlations that humans might miss—from lower acquisition to changes in purchasing behavior or decreased engagement—businesses are able to predict customer needs and preferences, heading off issues before they arise. Embracing a data- and AI-powered approach can help companies decipher the silent signals and discover actionable insights into the customer’s mindset.
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