It’s common knowledge that you can serve your customers better when you have a deeper understanding of how they feel, but it can be difficult to gauge this information over the phone. For example, unless a caller is audibly angry and upset, your agent handling the call may not pick up on all the subtleties in their diction and tone of voice to know their true emotional state. Fortunately, call center sentiment analysis tools can do this for you.
If your call center software is equipped with these tools, it can scan and evaluate customer communications across various channels to identify their emotions and attitudes. This way, whenever a person interacts with an agent via phone, online chat, text, or email, the sentiment analysis tools can gauge their emotional state to help guide the interaction to a better result.
For example, if the tool detects that a customer is becoming increasingly frustrated, it can escalate the call to a supervisor automatically. The end result is an improved customer experience and more effective agent performance over time.
In today’s market, most call centers already consider these tools a must-have, if only for their ability to simplify the customer relationship-building process. When you’re ready to upgrade your call center with this technology, two choices to consider are NextivaONE and Call Criteria.
NextivaONE’s Customer Experience Plugin
NextivaONE’s intuitive workspace brings teams together with a collaborative shared platform to manage business phone calls, texts, meetings, and contacts. It also features several targeted plugins to boost performance in key areas, including customer service. When you activate the customer experience plugin, you gain immediate access to what is arguably the best sentiment analysis tool on the market.
The NextivaONE customer experience plugin can:
- Scan calls and emails for keywords that imply a positive or negative sentiment, giving agents the fast, useful information they can use to respond more effectively
- Provide real-time alerts that clue agents into the callers who require immediate or extra attention
- Prepare agents before calls with Nextiva’s Call Pop feature, which instantly displays crucial customer information (such as previous sentiment scores, account value, experience score, and survey feedback) on an agent’s screen before they pick up the phone
- Streamline customer and ticket history by organizing all previous interactions between a particular caller and your team into a clear timeline, helping agents grasp the whole story and maximize every second of conversation
- Activate automated workflows whenever customer sentiment shifts, catching anything your agents might have missed
- Track and catalog key metrics by channel, along with a host of analytics tools engineered to help measure and elevate your team’s performance
- Improve internal collaboration with leading productivity features such as team chat, integrated calendars, and desktop SMS
Nextiva offers three tiers of plans priced to suit a range of business sizes. The Entrepreneurs and Teams plans can be tested out via a 7-day free trial.
The Entrepreneurs plan costs $10 per user per month and is meant for individuals and small teams of up to three users. The plan includes essential services like business calling, messaging, texting, video meetings, threaded conversations, contact management, contact notes, calendars, and scheduling. It also provides access to self-help software support.
The Teams plan costs $20 per user per month and is meant for collaborative groups of up to 10 users. It offers extras such as shared and private contacts, team chat workforce management, unlimited team collaboration rooms, file sharing, video conferencing, and meeting recording. Teams plan users also get access to live email and chat support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The Business plan costs $30 per user per month and is suitable for larger teams because it comes with unlimited users. It offers a long list of upgrades, including business Interactive Voice Response (IVR) services, real-time analytics, unlimited recording, voicemail transcription, advanced admin and user role settings, and single sign-on capabilities. The Business plan also comes with priority support that’s available around the clock.
Call Criteria Sentiment Analysis
Call Criteria is another great choice for call center sentiment analysis because it’s a voice-based option with an evolved approach to AI integration. Meanwhile, since AI technology is relatively new and still requires guided prompts for best results, Call Criteria provides ongoing human support and oversight to make sure its users are getting accurate data and reports.
The platform’s analytics tools are also good for getting a clear picture of the strengths and weaknesses in your current customer approach. It uses emotion detection features powered by Machine Learning (ML) to pinpoint terms and phrases that can detect a caller’s feelings and emotions—along with the reasons behind them. There’s also an intent analysis feature that predicts a customer’s next moves and suggests targeted agent responses.
Call Criteria gives call centers:
- Accurate insights with a combined system that uses both rule-based and automatic approaches to develop its analyses and predictions
- Sophisticated speech analytics that combines AI with human oversight to help create, optimize, and validate effective system queries
- Continuous Machine Learning technology that uses every customer interaction to grow and adapt its knowledge base and approaches
- AI agent coaching via customizable dashboards with skill evaluations, progress tracking, and needs-based support
- An AI-human hybrid system to spearhead model training and fine-tuned algorithm development
- Powerful productivity support with data labeling, image classification, and video recognition services that leverage AI’s potential to take lengthy information-gathering tasks off your plate
Call Criteria is one of the only software solutions that has real humans review its AI insights, which is meant to remove any false results that might skew your customer data or misalign with caller sentiments. To learn more and get a pricing quote, you’ll have to request a consultation.
Is Call Center Sentiment Analysis Really Worth the Money?
If you’re just starting out and your budget is tight, you may want to wait until your call flows and IVR systems are in place before you think about adding sentiment analysis. Keep in mind that each software solution requires time to implement and learn, so doing too many things at once can negatively affect your operations.
However, once you’ve gotten the hang of tracking your call center metrics and your agents are functioning smoothly, introducing call sentiment analysis can make a big difference in your call center’s performance.
When implemented properly, for example, it can directly lead to a lower Average Handle Time (AHT), better First Call Resolution (FCR), and increased Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores. It’s also a great tool for improving the quality and consistency of your customer service experience, which can lead to lower customer churn and more opportunities to make additional sales—thus offsetting the cost of implementation.
