As artificial intelligence and analytics both become more consumable, enterprises and small businesses alike are pushing for more access to their data.
Tim Banting, Principal Analyst at Ovum, recently shared an anecdote on what AI actually stands for in the Unified Comms and Contact Centre world today:
The importance of capturing all data
In a quest to find out what businesses can actually be consuming in terms of AI, I met with Richard Stevenson, Chief Executive Officer at Red Box, to see how close we are to utilising AI in communications, and to learn how Red Box is empowering customers to leverage voice data by offering an open platform that integrates with an ecosystem of of AI and analytics partners.
“When any organisation is looking at analytics or artificial intelligence, feeding in voice data with rich metadata is probably the most valuable thing you can do”
“When the data set is of high value, you need to make sure you have open access to it and ownership of it. If you have a vendor that locks that data down, it’s of no use to you”
“Looking at artificial intelligence with voice, you need to make sure that organisation wide conversations are being captured. Otherwise there is a risk of data silos and the results may not deliver the outcomes you need. Unless you capture all conversations, you never really understand the true voice of the customer. Equally, if you are not able to record conversations that occur about that customer, you are missing out on insights surrounding that transaction.”
I referenced a scenario that I witnessed just that week. A call came into the call centre, but the outcome was outsourced to the sales team. It seemed as if, despite the call ending without a customer outcome in the call centre, the case was closed because the caller was no longer in the call centre journey.
In this case, it meant the customer interaction was no longer recorded, therefore the outcome could not be measured. Or worse, the outcome has been measured incorrectly. Richard pointed out some key partnerships Red Box has and explained how their partner integrations ensures access to all voice interactions to be leveraged by customers.
“Businesses find it difficult to access all information. With our open API architecture and partners like Xdroid, Tethr, ThetaLake and Refract, we empower customers to leverage voice data within their AI strategy”.
Use cases for organisation-wide voice recording
Call recording across the entire business should be a no brainer if you serve a customer at any point, otherwise AI can only feed off a limited data set. I asked Richard to call out some specific use cases for capturing this data and putting it to use with AI and analytics.
“You never really understand how many people are involved in any particular interaction. This means that you don’t know what the cost of an interaction is and you can’t measure how efficient or effective you are being.
For example, in wealth management, you have to write up a report of what happened on a call. Writing a report on a five minute call takes another five minutes, but if your system automatically provides an accurate transcription of that call, the productivity gains are vast. Not only do you save time filing the report, but you also get a richer experience than if you were to write that report yourself.
For example, rather than ‘I spoke to David about his pension’, you get greater insight and more accurate information. This is a pure, bottom line productivity gain. Less errors drive better customer satisfaction. However additional analysis on these conversations can also pinpoint optimal lead conversion points, provide insights around objection handling and identify what offers or promotions are working best to help guide staff training and coaching. There are also huge benefits around compliance in terms of automating auditing processes and proactive risk management”.
Using sentiment analysis as a proactive tool
Richard then explained some further benefits as you start to exploit more of the technology available, like sentiment analysis.
“If you’re monitoring across the whole organisation, you can intervene when you see sentiment towards a product or service dipping which then enables you to prevent churn rates from increasing.”
“You can then work on targeting specific products to the right customers. It could be the perfect time to offer a product to a customer, or the complete opposite”
The Red Box extended architecture provides real-time streaming so API partners can analyse certain phrases to utilise buying signals and improve sales conversion rates. This is just one example of the things that AI and voice capture, when coupled together, can do to start transforming your customer experience process.
Preparing for AI from the back-end
The front-end element of what is presented will be key to the best businesses winning the customer experience race. Often forgotten though, the back-end must be taken care of too, and be absolutely bulletproof. Richard points out some of the key challenges that Red Box sees today.
“You’ve got to remember that for capture and storage, the resilience needs to be there and captured data needs to be high quality. The foundational elements that Red Box has built its reputation on (never lose a call, be the most resilient, capture from every source) ring true when we’re talking about leveraging AI and call analytics”.
The ‘any source’ element of Red Box’s proposition is pertinent to the current market state where customers are moving from on-premises to cloud phone systems and still want or need to leverage existing investment and functionality.
“Some platforms will only capture from modern phone systems but nearly every customer we talk to has a mix,” says Richard.
“You can’t solely rely on a call recording platform that works with modern systems. There is no business case to be made for AI by stripping out absolutely everything all at once”
Visit Red Box for more information on how they are empowering partners to help customers introduce AI into their organisation.
