Q&A: Wix Achieves Contact Center Success from Speech Analytics, Coaching

With a combination of strategic and technological tools available, no contact center can be excused for falling out of touch with its customers.

In this Q&A with Call Center IQ reporter Shawn Siegel, Jamie Morin, Wix's senior vice president of client operations, provides proof of how live coaching, enterprise feedback management and speech analytics empower her organization's contact center.

You can next hear from Jamie at the Call Center Performance, Productivity and Metrics.

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Shawn Siegel, CCIQ: Can you discuss some concrete ways WEX has benefitted from using speech analytics?

Jamie Morin, Wix: The contact center team was the champion for the speech analytics investment. Our contact center director had worked with an SA system in another organization and knew that it had broader applications than service alone. She engaged in an education campaign with colleagues in sales and marketing and ultimately made a cross functional business case for the investment based on using it in both service and inside sales. The system has been very valuable in a number of ways, including training, direct mail campaign refinement, and customer experience improvements.

Hard Results:

• Response rate increase of 13%
• Close rate increase of 11%
• Productivity improvements of 10 FTE (2x goal)

Soft Results:

• Improved customer experience through speech analytics driven improvements to online self service tools
• Enhanced service training through the use of call recording and screen capture reviews
• Increased cross functional collaboration through joint "listening sessions" that uncover unintended ways we make things challenging for customers

Siegel: How can you maximize the benefits of speech analytics by integrating it with enterprise feedback management?

Morin: EFM systems are very good at capturing the sentiment of individual customers and aggregating scores into opinion trends. They also provide the mechanism for closing the loop on customer issues that are uncovered through verbatim comments or poor scores, which is invaluable. How often do you complete a satisfaction survey describing something that needs attention with the belief that you’ll actually hear back from that organization? For me, it’s not often. In fact it’s a surprise if someone follows up.

That said, EFM data analysis is limited by the size of your response rate. On the other hand, SA systems allow you to sample 100% of your call data and mine for real time and longer term trends. It’s less about integrating these systems than it is about integrating the customer experience insights made available through each of these tools. A voice of the customer team with expertise in both tools can create a robust picture of customer experience that combines the power of data with the customer call recordings. As an example, our EFM data was indicating the need to improve our self service user provisioning process, but it wasn’t until our IT partners heard how the problem affected customers in their own words, on top of seeing SA data that told them how often this topic came up in a 100% sample of customer calls, that the issue rose to the top of the priority list.

Siegel: Are there any new or emerging technologies (outside of speech analytics) that you’re finding has great application for customer service?

Morin: As a B2B company we tend to lag a bit on emerging technology adoption as compared to our B2C counterparts. Our focus right now is on expanding customer interaction channels to include mobile and chat. Neither of these could be described as emerging technologies but the interest in having this type of access to our service teams and self service channels is beginning to grow in our customer base.

Siegel: How often do you share live calls with reps for training purposes? And how do you determine what the "worst" calls really are?

Morin: We regularly use live calls as a coaching and training tool. CSRs and team leaders listen to calls in coaching sessions; reps who have had a particularly challenging call might flag it and ask a colleague or a coach to listen and give them advice. And calls are incorporated into training programs to provide examples of what works and what doesn’t and what excellent service sounds like at WEX. As to how you determine what the "worst" calls really are… some of them are glaringly apparent. To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Stewart, you know them when you hear them. Others are more subtle, they may sound warm and appreciative of the customer’s time and business but they may be providing inaccurate information or not digging deep enough into the situation. We use an internal call roadmap tool that describes what it takes to be an effective customer advocate within our business as a guide in this case.

Siegel: Lastly, contact centers are inundated with data these days, how do you overcome the challenge of sorting that data into action points?

Morin: At a macro level, by listening to what our associates have to say about situations when we are not easy to do business with and syncing that insight with our EFM and SA data to identify the biggest areas of opportunity. At a micro level, by setting customer response triggers in our EFM system so we can quickly respond to anyone who has had a negative experience in some way.