How To Spot Product Trends Or Issues Using Contact Center Data

5 min read
September 15, 2022 at 12:38 AM

With the adoption of new data processing technology and Big Data, companies are collecting more data from their customers through the implementation of customer loyalty programs, phone/email/online surveys, order histories, and much more. But this gives you a limited view of the world. For example, survey response rates are at an all-time low (18% for a phone survey), and you are drawing from a very limited pool of survey participants.

That's where voice analytics comes in. Voice analytics is a data processing technique that can automatically detect keywords or key phrases from recorded customer interactions, such as calls to your contact center. This information can be used to understand customer sentiment, identify product trends or issues, and much more.

Benefits Of Using Voice Analytics To Identify Product Trends Or Issues

Because you are not limited by response rates, you can get a more accurate view of customer sentiment, e.g., how customers feel about your product, pricing, competitor products, functionality, value, and more. Here are some of the benefits of using voice analytics for product trends.

Identify customer pain points. You can get real-time insights into customer pain points and how your product is (or isn't) solving them.

Improve your product faster and with more focus. By identifying your customer's pain points and gathering product feedback early, you can improve your product much faster. Since this is directly informed by the buyers themselves, these targeted improvements are more likely to be a big hit.

Identify product trends or issues. Frequently, companies realize trends and issues after order volume has already changed. By analyzing these trends in real-time, you can respond early on, allowing you to react to customer demands much faster.

Address your customer's concerns early on. You can use voice analytics to address customer concerns long before they become expensive problems, e.g., customers switching to a competitor due to better functionality or price.

Analyze return reasons. You can get to the bottom of the reasons why customers are returning products. Is it because the product is broken? Was it shipped too late? Does the customer not understand it or not see the value in it?

Gather customer feedback. Rather than directly surveying people and getting a skewed response (due to the fact that people self-select whether or not they want to answer the survey), you collect customer feedback after a pricing change, a new product launch, significant improvements, and more.

Collect competitive intelligence. Your customers are an endless source of competitive intelligence. Use voice analytics to monitor for product/pricing/functionality changes to inform your product strategy and marketing.

Cross-reference it with other data insights. Use your customer insights gleaned from voice analytics to cross-reference data gathered from other sources, such as your SEO, website intelligence, and orders vs. returns numbers.

These are just a few reasons why analyzing your contact center call recordings for product-related questions using voice analytics data makes so much sense. Now, let's have a look at how easy it is to accomplish this.

How To Implement Voice Analytics For Product Intelligence

1. Implement Voice Analytics Solution

Setting up voice analytics to monitor product trends and issues is easy. First, of course, you will need an Artificial Intelligence-based voice analytics solution like MiaRec's Voice Analytics on top of your call recording. Depending on the solution, this can be implemented relatively quickly. For example, with MiaRec, you can be up and running in less than a day.

2. Create A Plan

Then, you need to create a voice analytics strategy. This doesn't have to be something complicated. It just needs to be a detailed plan outlining what insights you are looking for. This can include the general monitoring of product names at first, and can expand all the way to specific questions you would like to gain more insights from.

Include your product development, management, and marketing teams, as well as marketing and sales, in creating the strategy so that you not only get buy-in from the organization, but also ask the right questions to be sure that this information is valuable and will be used.

3. Create A Keyword Bank

Next, you need to create a keyword bank containing all product names you are interested in and would like to get insights on. In addition to the actual product name, this bank can include internal code-names, product category and surrounding technology names, different versions, competitor's product names, etc.

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For example, Microsoft has a well-known product that has been rebranded a couple of times. Still, most people don't use the new name but refer to it as Config Manager, Configuration Manager, System Center Configuration Manager, SCCM, or Endpoint Manager. So it is crucial to add all the possible names to your keyword bank.

4. Add Context

Once you have entered all relevant product names, you should add some context to be able to recognize patterns in your data automatically. For example, to gather feedback on pricing, you can add key phrases such as "too expensive", "it's cheaper on Amazon", "not worth the money", "[competitor name] is less expensive", "costs more", and "worth every penny" to your keyword bank.

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Sophisticated voice analytics solutions will recognize these even if they aren't an exact match or have other words in between. Another way that adding context can help is in determining the reasons for a return. Was it an education issue? If so, look for keywords such as "I couldn't get it to work" or "I couldn't figure it out." Was it a functionality issue? Look for the phrase "too hard to use".

Use a common sense approach to add more color to the keywords to get deeper insights.

5. Analyze The Data & Get Your Insights

Now it's time to analyze your call recordings. Start by automatically transcribing all call recordings using AI-driven Speech-to-Text Transcription and extracting keywords based on the plan and keyword bank you have created, e.g., by utilizing MiaRec's Automatic Keyword Spotting tool. Once the Voice Analytics solution has analyzed all your call recordings, it's time to get insights from the data.

This can be done in various ways, depending on the voice analytics solution you are using. Some solutions, like MiaRec, let you assign keywords and phrases to topics you can further analyze.

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In addition, they offer ready-to-use dashboards with insightful graphics for different product names to help you get started quickly. Other solutions might require a bit more work to get started but will offer more flexibility for getting insights from the voice analytics data.

6. Take Action

Now that you have valuable product intelligence from voice analytics, it's time to take action. This might be anything from tweaking your product development roadmap to launching a new marketing campaign. No matter what it is, make sure to take action based on the voice analytics data to improve your product strategy, development, and marketing.

By following these simple steps, you can use voice analytics to get valuable insights into customer behavior surrounding your products to improve your product strategy, development, and marketing. So don't wait any longer and get started with voice analytics today!

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