They are calling. Are you listening?

With hundreds or thousands of calls coming in to your call centre every week, whether it is in-house or outsourced, you have a fantastic opportunity to gain a better understanding of your customers and stakeholders, by leveraging the data already available in your call centre data.

How your customers feel about you relates to their interactions with you via one or more of your touch points. Touch points are simply the ways you interact with your customers like your service centre, website, direct mail pieces, invoices and events. Think about your own experiences as a consumer. All touch points are important points of contact and many would say the most recent is the most memorable.

One of the primary touch points for many organisations is their call centre.

If you have a call centre, you may already be tracking inbound calls for volume, duration and time taken to resolve the issue. You may even know the most common call types, like invoice, product, or fault queries. But do you know what prompted them to call, how many others have called about the same issue over time (not just within a week), who is calling and what they are like, and who your most frequent callers are? Often these nuggets of gold are trapped in the free-text notes your call centre staff key into your database. The good news is that it is possible to mine this data for insights to get closer to your customers, and identify operational improvements that will improve how your customers’ feel about your company.

Datamine can analyse free text notes. We do this by building an extensive data dictionary of words, as well as determining as many traditional and non-traditional abbreviations and permutations of those words as possible. Words within the notes fields can then be viewed in context to accurately assign various classification levels to the notes.

For example, after your invoices are sent out you may receive many calls from people who have automatic payments set-up. Analysing the notes may reveal their call was prompted by confusion about their automatic payment is working OK. This could lead to a simple layout change to avoid confusion and subsequent calls – saving you time and money and increasing customer satisfaction.