The disruption of the traditional call centre model is already underway, with chatbots, automated messaging and voice response sweeping up the easy-to-answer low-hanging fruit of the customer care world—your FAQs and your quick fixes, if you will—and fundamentally shifting the foundation on which the call centre model was built.

But like all work environments molded and chiselled by the advancement of automation and artificial intelligence, the effects aren’t all grim for the real people who work in the industry. 

Sentiment and context are some of the hardest things to determine

The implementation of AI text analytics technology tends to have the counterbalancing effect of making the work of employees all the more impactful and all the more important, helping them not just provide answers to customer qualms but effectively reduce the churn rate of a business.

With automated services picking up the customer service slack with simple solutions to less consequential problems, agents’ time can be freed up to effectively manage more pressing pain points. But technology is just as critical at this stage of the customer service process, where companies have potentially the greatest opportunity to keep customers happy and retain their business.

Why churn matters

Anita Toth, a consultant specializing in helping businesses reduce customer churn, uses the metaphor of a relationship to get to the heart of how customer service can play into churn.

“When you’re dating somebody, there’s a lot of attention paid to you and then once you get into the relationship, some of that tension tends to dwindle off,” she says. “It’s really similar here: once people become customers, they tend to not get as much attention paid to them, there are gaps in how often they communicate, and they may feel they’re not as valued.”

What happens next represents, in Toth’s view, both the greatest risk and the greatest opportunity for businesses regarding their customer base: effective communication can make all the difference between keeping a customer happy or handing them off to your competitors.

Call centre agents can identify the root cause of an issue, relying on customer feedback analysis tools designed to do just that.

“Sentiment and context are some of the hardest things to determine,” explains Toth. “The best way to reduce churn is to ask more probing questions to get an idea of what it is that is actually bothering the customer.” Existing technology around sentiment analysis has the potential to not only better position call centre agents to manage unhappy customers, but can also help businesses maintain a better handle on customer satisfaction and potential sticking points. “66% of customers are happy to give a business a second chance if they address their real underlying issue,” says Toth. “But you have to dig for it.”

How data can help

66% of customers are happy to give a business a second chance if they address their real underlying issue, but you have to dig for it.

The first step, according to Toth, lies in qualitative data collection—for which call centres can be a veritable gold mine. “There has to be a system in place where calls can be categorized broadly,” she explains. “This is where you can use AI to figure out what the main themes are. You are going to notice patterns that come up, that people tend to be complaining about or struggling with, and you can start categorizing them.”

Toth describes a scenario where a business might have ten buckets under which complaints can fall into, which establishes context within which agents can operate effectively, answer complaints intelligently, and ultimately, help customers feel heard. This way, call centre agents can more efficiently identify what could be the root cause of an issue, relying on customer feedback analysis tools designed to do just that. “Once you get those categories in place, you can start developing a system so that when a support call comes in, the agent can look at the broad themes and ask probing questions to come to a resolution much faster.”

Toth also cautions her clients not to underestimate the true cost of customer churn. From Toth’s perspective, 80% of customer churn can be reduced, and much of it comes down to effective communication. With call centre agents armed with the tools they need to effectively listen, capture customer data and understand pain points, plus a strategy to maintain communication before things go sour, businesses have ample opportunities to keep the customers they worked so hard to court in the first place.

“It’s about making a conscious effort to keep in touch with customers,” says Toth. “The data then becomes so invaluable because you can start seeing patterns in what people are saying, and catching things before they become a problem.”

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When brand loyalty doesn’t come easy

“The millennial is a discerning consumer,” says Charles R. Taylor, the John A. Murphy Professor of Marketing at the Villanova University of Business, senior research fellow at the Center for Marketing and Consumer Insights and current editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Advertising. “This emphasis on corporate social responsibility is just another thing that the marketer needs to do to get the business.”

A hallmark of millennial consumer behaviours is a smaller degree of brand loyalty.

Add to that the fact that millennials are outpacing baby boomers as the largest adult population group in the U.S., and it becomes even more crucial for business owners and marketers alike to focus energy on reaching this somewhat elusive market. “Relatively younger consumers now are the largest group and have a great deal of purchasing power,” says Taylor. “Most millennials were exposed to the Great Recession and many of them have student loan debt as well, so there’s definitely more price sensitivity.” According to a recent report by Deloitte, the Great Recession had a disproportionate impact on millennials, who experienced an unemployment rate of 19.5 percent (versus 10.6 percent for the general population), plus a slower bounce back and a more significant hit to incomes.

Corporate responsibility as a marketing strategy

A hallmark of millennial consumer behaviours is a smaller degree of brand loyalty. But, notes Taylor, exceptions to the rule do exist—especially when brands can exhibit a significant investment in social responsibility. “The research suggests that if millennials feel that a brand is linked to their personal identity, they can become very brand loyal.” In order for businesses to succeed with the millennial demographic, it’s crucial that they show a genuine interest in social causes. “Millennials on average value diversity, so they like to see that reflected in advertising,” says Taylor. “They value companies that are committed to environmental causes and charitable contributions.”

One thing that millennials are willing to spend on is experiences.

Taylor points to the stellar example set by State Farm, who unveiled their Neighborhood of Good program in May 2019 with the aim of helping underprivileged youth get access to music education. Not only did the company target a major area of interest for millennials—music festivals—but at the same time, it offered an opportunity for them to support a praiseworthy cause by interacting with the brand. Taylor also highlights the importance of the experiential marketing element in State Farm’s latest initiative—something that millennials have proven, time and time again, to be especially receptive to. “One thing that millennials are willing to spend on is experiences,” he says. “A millennial might think it’s less important to own a car when they’re young, but they like to travel and have experiences like music festivals.”

Personalization is paramount

Generally, millennials also have less patience for brands that don’t do their due diligence when it comes to proper ad targeting and personalization. Where businesses in past decades may have gotten away with “spray and pray” marketing tactics, casting a wide net and seeing what sticks, consumers in the millennial bracket come with a high level of digital sophistication. They have high standards for communications from companies they view positively—which is where automation and data, and lots of it, enter the equation. “The way artificial intelligence is mostly used in marketing right now is to program messages such that they’re much more targeted at the consumer than they used to be…using these much more sophisticated data analytics to classify consumers into much narrower buckets and see what they’re interested in,” explains Taylor.

The real magic is in transforming those mountains of data into actionable insights.

He uses the example of a craft chocolate producer to show how smaller, more niche businesses can benefit greatly from data-driven, highly targeted marketing efforts. “There are not that many people who are going to pay $12 for a chocolate bar. The craft chocolate people think it’s somewhere between a few hundred thousand and a million American consumers that are really craft chocolate buyers,” he says. “By using artificial intelligence to target ads to only those where there’s a lot of data-based belief that a person might be among that group, you can pinpoint them more through sophisticated algorithms that are predicting consumer behaviour.”

Delving into the data

Businesses today do have an upper hand when it comes to data, stemming from the fact that millennials are far more active and talkative online than their predecessors ever were. This gives marketers the ultimate gift—that of data, in the form of a digital paper trail of their customers’ truest preferences, thoughts, wants, needs and behaviours.

The real magic is in transforming those mountains of data into actionable insights—and text analytics software tools can be the ultimate magician’s assistant, turning undifferentiated masses of data into highly precise insights to guide the way towards good marketing decisions for businesses big and small. “Somehow, you’ve got to translate that into usable data, either to target an advertising message or to create the right product offering,” says Taylor. “I’ve been to conferences where you get somebody talking about some high-tech, flying saucer idea. But what we’re really seeing is not stuff that’s remarkable technologically but smart uses of data in a very programmatic way, such that it becomes artificial intelligence.”

Millennials may be harder to connect with than their consumer counterparts of previous generations, but with a little help from artificial intelligence, businesses have an opportunity to connect with an emerging customer base that’s taking up a larger share of the market every day.

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80 percent of reviews still originate from post-purchase emails.

“It has to be an ongoing, iterative process,” explains Zahra Young, Chief Marketing Officer at Skymount, a global provider of drones and satellite communications. She believes that, whether the communication is done through a phone call to the call centre, an email communication, an online chat or instant messenger, companies “need to be able to have a system in place to capture all that great feedback so that it helps the product, sales and marketing teams react quickly to changes that are required.” Half the battle today consists of reeling those reviews, ratings and feedback in.

Consider customer feedback a sound investment

Young believes that if companies don’t invest in customer experience, it can hurt them in the long run. “When it comes to email marketing, the cost is time you’re spending. We’re not talking about a huge investment,” Young says. “If you’re looking at more traditional ways of gathering customer feedback, like telephone calls and focus groups, those are larger investments, but fewer and fewer companies are going that route today.”

Chat platforms are another avenue open to businesses looking to increase their flow of customer feedback. They require a bit more of an investment—a tech platform and customer service resources to manage them—but, as Young points out, those investments can be measured and are most likely worth the spend. “If you don’t get your customer experience right, you’re hurting your brand,” says Young.

Lean on a foundation of email communication

Just because customers turn to other online avenues like Yelp or Google to share their satisfaction—or lack thereof—with products, that doesn’t make the tried-and-true method of asking (kindly) for a rating or review obsolete. According to a study carried out by Northwestern University’s Spiegel Digital Database and Research Center, 80 percent of reviews still originate from post-purchase emails. “We can’t forget about email,” Young confirms. “We get emails [at Skymount] all the time from customers and, right now, it’s still the most important method of gaining feedback on what our customers are thinking and saying.”

If you don’t get your customer experience right, you’re hurting your brand.

Still, Young cautions companies to beware of overdoing it. In an increasingly populated marketing environment, customers aren’t just getting the odd email from companies on occasion. “The frequency of sending a communication to a customer has to be monitored so that we’re not bombarding them all the time,” she explains.

Timing is everything

Like most things in life, the timing of an event is almost as crucial as the event itself. Customer feedback requests are no exception. “The most seamless way of getting a customer review is when they’ve just completed an action,” advises Young. “If [they] receive an email a week after [they’ve] finished reading an eBook, for example, and it’s out of [their] mind, [they] might tend to procrastinate or delete it altogether.”

With automated email scheduling platforms now at our disposal, it’s never been easier to get that timing perfect, planning emails that can go out as soon as they’re triggered—by a purchase from a new customer, for example. Young also encourages companies to stay in touch with customers on available modes of communication. “Not everyone is tech-savvy, so you have to encourage customers to contact you right away if they hit a snag,” says Young. “Repeat, at every customer touchpoint, how they can get in touch. The easier you make it for your customers, with different ways to communicate with you, the more you’ll be able to get valuable feedback.”

Tread lightly with incentives

One method businesses can explore as they pursue gathering customer feedback is incentivization, which can be effective at increasing response rates. However, Young advises that businesses

The goal should be genuine, honest feedback, and those waters can get murky when incentives enter into the mix.

be careful with asking for reviews and ratings in exchange for rewards. The goal should be genuine, honest feedback, and those waters can get murky when incentives enter into the mix. “We may be skewing the results if we’re sort of forcing a product review,” says Young. “Where I have seen it work time and time again is in online research, where it’s not necessarily a product review but more of a general research initiative.”

Test email subject lines

Today, with the sheer number of requests people receive from companies asking for ratings and reviews, businesses have to work that much harder to grab users’ attention in an often crowded inbox. “Believe it or not, subject-line testing when we send the emails out makes a difference as well. It’s really [about] how to stand out in an inbox,” says Young. With tools like Test Subject by Zurb, Headline Analyzer by Coschedule and Spam Check by Postmark, there’s no excuse to ship off your email communications without first verifying their effectiveness. Tools like these will help make your copy more effective while steering your email clear of the dreaded spam folder.

Sure, it looks great when a seller has a never-ending stream of positive reviews but do you know what looks even better, in the grand scheme of things? Genuinely satisfied customers.

At the end of the day, customer feedback is more about quality than quantity and is about continually improving customer experience. Sure, it looks great when a seller on Amazon or Google has a never-ending stream of positive reviews—and those reviews do count. But do you know what looks even better, in the grand scheme of things? Genuinely satisfied customers.

Often, marketers can miss the most valuable thing about requesting feedback in an effort to nail the perfect email strategy: the feedback itself. Once businesses have perfected their customer feedback retrieval strategies, AI tools can help make sense of all the chatter and give businesses a clear read on what consumers are thinking, feeling and saying—analyzing everything from open-source data to social media commentary to survey results.

This also allows businesses who haven’t yet dipped a toe into the ocean of customer sentiment analysis to form a baseline and begin to track from that foundation. From there, all the peaks, valleys and modulations of customer sentiment will be easy to catch and address where needed. With these tools in hand, massive amounts of data can be read and synthesized before you can even utter “your feedback means a lot to us.”

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