Three Things Contact Center Customers Taught Me at Interactions 2019

My favorite part of NICE's annual Interactions event is the customers. My teammates and I work hard to make sure each and every attendee walks away with ideas, fulfillment, and smiles. When we finally arrive, and Interactions has its first evening happy hour, I'm always enthusiastically thinking how the hard work was so worth it! Each year I walk away with a richer understanding of what our customers want from us, and with a greater wisdom for how I can better serve both my company and our customers going forward.

This year's topics that I learned more about:

1. Sentiment Analysis is being used in many ways.
2. Business leaders must be supportive of changing the way the organization operates with analytics.
3. Much to the second point, Tried and True means getting left behind. Analytics is the future.

First of all, let's define how Sentiment Analysis works. It is an AI-based algorithm that analyzes 100% of the interactions in a data set, both audio and text based, and scores those interactions individually or as a whole. The score is a sliding scale, relative to its findings, with 0 as the median. Negative scores correlate directly to negative interactions, and positive scores to positive interactions. Example results could see negative go as low as -10, maybe even -20 or lower, with positive swinging similarly into +10 or as far as +20 or higher. The more neutral interactions tend to comprise the bulk of the results and fall in the middle, but it is important to note that every data set yields its own results due to the relativity of the data.

The magic of this kind of analysis is in the ways some customers are using it. We learned that one customer is redesigning their entire Quality Management program using sentiment modeling. Rather than random sampling, they can identify patterns of negative and positive sentiment by agent, team, or site. They can examine them against other team members, teams, or sites and begin to see outliers. By studying why the team members with higher sentiment scores are doing so well, coaching plans can be built for the team members with lower sentiment scores. Feedback so far has been very positive, especially among the agents who can understand objectively how they are performing and take a more active role in their growth.

To learn about another use case for sentiment, download this success story from TASC.

Using the example above, redesigning a Quality Management program involves a lot of individuals, and many people who have done the same thing for years may be resistant to changing their ways. This is a very natural human trait, and it is not unexpected. But the strongest force lies in the business leaders and the management. If the higher level individuals don't fully embrace that change is going to happen for the greater empowerment of all employees, dissatisfaction will reign supreme. It takes time and education, often across many different areas of an organization, and it is important to address concerns and show the path forward with internal planning and execution before the analytics program is even deployed. There are so many positive gains in deploying business level and contact center level analytics, it is important that these be defined and communicated.

A similarly important subject is that businesses using analytics operate in new and innovative ways. They are always working for improvement, of employees, of products, of processes, and more. Just because the "old way" seems to work, it is critical that everyone in an analytics driven organization recognize that change is something to be comfortable with. Operating without analytics is very much like operating in the dark. There are many unknowns that will come to light with analytics, and those unknowns must be acted on if businesses and employees want to remain relevant.

Visit www.nice.com/analytics for more information and whitepapers.