Reshaping the Contact Center with Intelligent Guidance
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6 intelligent guidance tactics for contact center leaders
Introduction
1. Retention: Churn risk
2. Retention: Cancellation Requests
3. Operations: Average handle time
4. Operations: First-call resolution
5. Sales: Cross-sell and upsell offers
6. Sales: Rebuttals
Introduction
“The benefits of intelligent guidance can extend beyond the contact center. CX and contact center leaders can use post-call data to uncover opportunities to reduce customer churn, increase sales, and lower operational costs, then adjust their real-time agent guidance to achieve those outcomes.”
5:50
How Intelligent Guidance is Transforming Contact Center Roles (Don Davey, Sr Director of Customer Success, Creovai)
3:38
How Contact Center Technology Powers Intelligent Guidance (Amanda Lucio, Product Manager, Creovai)
10:34
How Intelligent Guidance and AI Are Reshaping the Contact Center (Simon Black, COO, Creovai)
Playbook: 6 intelligent guidance tactics for contact center leaders
1. Retention: Churn Risk
Guide your agents to win back at-risk customers before they churn.
Use cases
THE PLAY
Identify and address churn risk in customer interactions
1
Use your conversation intelligence platform to get a filtered view of calls including behaviors that you know are leading indicators for churn, such as: missed promises, remedy demands, or detractor signals. (We recommend looking at one variable at a time.)
2
Generate a report that shows topics frequently discussed on these calls, broken out by volume and percentage of total. Examples might include: income loss, divorce, or bill dispute.
3
Choose the highest impact topic (based on volume and percentage) and filter your results to calls containing those topics. If you’re using Creovai’s advanced analytics, you can look at our predictive scores (sentiment, CSAT, effort) to identify the calls with positive outcomes. With our AI Questions feature, you can even identify the specific calls in which a customer who called to cancel decided not to.
4
Look for trends in agent behaviors on these positive outcome calls. Review the transcripts on a sampling of these calls to identify the steps agents take and the language they use to deliver a positive experience to churn risk customers.
5
Update workflow steps, coaching prompts, and scripts in your real-time guidance platform to include the most effective actions from these positive outcome calls. This will help agents navigate calls with dissatisfied customers and reduce the risk of churn.
BONUS: If you have set up your conversation intelligence platform to flag competitor mentions, you can also identify the competitors mentioned most frequently on churn risk calls. You can then drill into the transcripts for calls with these mentions to better understand why customers are considering leaving you for a competitor and develop responses or offers to win these customers back.
2. Retention: Cancellation requests
Increase your average customer lifetime value by saving accounts at risk of cancelling.
Use cases
THE PLAY
Use your most successful save offers to reduce churn
1
Monitor cancellation requests and specific save offers in your conversation intelligence platform.
2
Build a save offer report that uses save attempt frequency as the x-axis and success rate as the y-axis. This will give you four quadrants showing save offers with: low save rates and low attempts, low save rates and high attempts, high save rates and low attempts, high save rates and high attempts.
3
Look at the save offers in the High Save Rate and Low Attempts quadrant. This is a good place to start because it shows you offers that have a high success rate but are underused by agents.
4
Add prompts for these save offers to your real-time guidance platform. You can set them up to be triggered by a workflow step (e.g., the agent selects the customer’s reason for canceling) or keyword (e.g., the customer says why they want to cancel). This will help agents use relevant offers with the highest probability for success.
3. Operations: Average handle time
Decrease average handle time with real-time workflows and prompts that address agent knowledge gaps.
Use cases
THE PLAY
Identify AHT drivers and create targeted coaching prompts to help agents resolve issues more efficiently
1
Use your conversation intelligence platform to get a filtered view of long calls. You might choose a minimum length to define as long or choose all calls longer than your AHT. (Note: If you’re using Creovai, we have an out-of-the-box dashboard to help you track your AHT and the factors impacting it.)
2
Run a report to identify the topics most frequently mentioned on long calls. This will give you an idea of the issues agents are struggling to resolve efficiently. (Note: With Creovai, you can also view the average time added to calls and the estimated annualized cost of these issues.)
3
Start by investigating the issue with the highest cost based on volume and average time added. Look for trends in agent behaviors on these calls and review a sampling of call transcripts to get a better understanding of what’s causing these calls to be longer than average.
4
Ask yourself if there’s an opportunity to reduce the length of these calls by revising current workflows or creating prompts to address topics that frequently trip agents up. If the answer is yes, make these updates to your real-time guidance.
4. Operations: First-call resolution
Identify common causes of repeat contacts and help agents address these issues on the first call.
Use cases
THE PLAY
Trigger coaching prompts to help agents forward-solve the issues most likely to lead to a repeat contact
1
Select a timeframe (e.g., the past 3 days, the past week) and isolate calls that have a repeat contact or are a repeat contact (Creovai identifies this based on contact ID).
2
Run a report to identify the topics most frequently mentioned on repeat calls. Look at the rate and overall volume of these topics to determine which ones have the biggest impact.
3
Start with the highest impact topic and filter your transcripts to show only repeat contacts that mention this topic. Look for trends within these calls by exploring other topics and agent behaviors that appear on these calls. (For example: if the topic is “service cancellation” and agents used “powerless-to-help" language on a large volume of calls, it might indicate that agents don’t have the right knowledge or tools to cancel services.)
4
Review a sampling of calls to get a deeper understanding of the issue that’s driving repeat contacts.
5
Make changes to your real-time workflows or prompts to help agents successfully address the issue on the first call, reducing the likelihood that the customer will need to call back.
5. Sales: Cross-sell and upsell offers
Prompt sales reps with the cross-sell and upsell offers most likely to convert.
Use cases
THE PLAY
A/B test sales offers and prompt sales agents to use the winning variant
1
Identify two upsell or cross-sell offers you want to test against one another (your A and B variants).
2
Use your real-time guidance platform to prompt half your agents to use Offer A and half to use Offer B on relevant calls.
3
Use your conversation intelligence platform to look at the conversion rates for calls containing Offer A vs. Offer B.
4
If one offer is clearly outperforming the other, update your real-time guidance to make that the primary offer you prompt agents with on relevant calls.
6. Sales: Rebuttals
Make sure sales representatives always have the best rebuttal for every objection.
Use cases
THE PLAY
Coach sales representatives to use the most effective rebuttals when a customer gives an objection
1
Track the specific rebuttals you train your agents to use in your conversation intelligence platform.
2
Build a rebuttal report that uses volume as the x-axis and conversion rate as the y-axis. This will give you four quadrants showing rebuttals with: low conversion rates and low volumes, high conversion rates and low volumes, low conversion rates and high volumes, and high conversion rates and high volumes.
3
Look at the rebuttals in the High Conversion Rate and Low Volume quadrant. This is a good place to start because it shows you rebuttals that perform well but are underused by sales representatives.
4
Add prompts for these rebuttals to your real-time guidance platform. You can set them up to be triggered by keywords or phrases (e.g., a customer says some variation of “that’s too expensive.”) This will help representatives use the rebuttals with the highest chance of overcoming customers’ objections.