CX leaders are using AI to increase their coverage and deepen their understanding of the customer experience. Communications Mining goes beyond surface-level sentiment analysis to provide real-time analysis of customer emotion and service quality, as well as customer needs, issues and intents.
CX practitioners are only starting to get comfortable with AI technology. Of course, the use of automation and sentiment analysis tools is well-established and has driven considerable improvements - particularly in the B2C world.
Yet, only CX leaders have started to make proper use of sophisticated AI solutions. This includes machine learning tools that don’t just mimic human behaviour but which are approaching human understanding and decision-making capabilities.
Such tools don’t just make work more efficient, they expand our understanding of the customer experience. They give us coverage, data and analysis that were never possible with human intelligence alone.
Communications Mining is one of the most powerful examples. Using machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), it transforms communications into structured data - at speed, at scale and from any channel.
CX leaders are now using Communications Mining to gain an unprecedented understanding of the customer experience - in terms of scale, nuance and actionability. This, in turn, is enabling them to enhance the success and profitability of CX improvement initiatives.
Customer intent: What do customers really want?
What really sets Communications Mining apart from other CX analysis tools is its ability to extract customer intent from masses of communications data.
Every time a customer contacts your organisation - whether it’s to lodge a complaint or ask a question - the interaction has something important to say about your customer experience. Every message is a problem to be solved, an opportunity gained, a CX improvement to be made.
Yet, previously there was no scalable way to extract this critical intent. Manual methods could never achieve the scale or coverage required, taking only a random cross-sample of customer conversations and at great cost. You could never say for certain whether this sample feedback accurately represented the actual needs of your customer base.
Communications Mining solves this problem. It accurately and reliably extracts customer intents from every message - whether email, chat, or phone call - that passes through your business. No manual effort is needed to extract this information and powerful analytics can tell you what changes to prioritise.
With Communications Mining, you may discover a previously unknown issue in your order management process. A supplier could be the target of a specific, frequent customer complaint. A valuable business opportunity could be revealed when you see large numbers of customers demanding a new product feature or service.
Communications Mining reveals the ‘why’ behind customer interaction. It tells you what customers want and it guides you to prioritise the most valuable CX improvement opportunities.
Customer sentiment: Service quality in real-time
CX leaders are also using AI to reach the next level of customer sentiment analysis. Traditional sentiment analysis is based on keyword matching. Certain words are associated with specific emotions and sentiments.
But such solutions aren’t always accurate or reliable. These word associations are baked into the system, which doesn’t take account of context or nuance. A ‘friendly reminder’ by a customer doesn’t always mean they are happy with their experience.
Communications Mining takes a different approach. These solutions are specially-trained for every use case and unique business context. A rapid training process enables Communications Mining to learn what the words used by customers mean in a given business context, and exactly how customers feel when they use them.
The result is a real-time and accurate picture of customer sentiment and satisfaction across every communications channel used to contact the business. You can’t improve what you can’t measure - that’s why Communications Mining provides a way to accurately monitor customer sentiment at every stage of the customer journey.
CX leaders can see exactly where the problems are, focusing on the areas where customers are at their most dissatisfied. And, combined with intent extraction, they know exactly what to do to resolve the issue.
Accurate sentiment analysis lays the foundation for continuous improvement in the customer experience. Baselines can be set for acceptable, unacceptable and target customer satisfaction (CSAT) levels and performance measured against them. Custom alerts can be set up to alert CX leaders when service quality is dropping, allowing them to get ahead of the issue before it can snowball.
Operationalising the customer experience
When you know what customers want and how they feel, your voice in the enterprise grows. You can explain when and why customers leave, what keeps them loyal and how changes in the business are affecting them.
This capability is making CX teams an invaluable resource and starting the process of operationalisation in the business. This is the spreading of CX resource, insight and influence across the entire enterprise - making it truly customer-centric.
