Are You About to Be Dumped This Christmas?

Carolyn Arnold at Contexta360 questions if you are about to be dumped this Christmas.

Disturbingly, 98 per cent of organisations have no foresight of their customer’s intention to leave them.

This may seem unthinkable given the array of analytical tools at the disposal of today’s contact centres.

However, finding customer attrition markers that are buried deep within dark data is not the easiest of undertakings.

Dark Data

While dark data may sound sinister and slightly dodgy, there is nothing but good that may come from it. Unlocking it is the key to understanding and truly knowing the customer.

For just one second, consider the billions of conversations and communications that are happening right now at this very moment. Now consider that only 2 per cent of all organisations are mining that dark data and winning, quietly raising both their CX game and their bottom line.

The simple fact is that dark data is lurking in every crevasse of an organisation’s live, recorded and written communications. Neglecting it is costing organisations a great deal through loss of hard-won customers.

Today, with so much focus and investment in CX, it is mind-blowing to think that only a handful of successful organisations are paying attention to the dark data.

This lack of focus is affecting customer retention and, subsequently, lifetime value (LTV), employee job satisfaction, brand reputation and net promoter scores (NPS) and a lot more besides.

Voice of the customer-enriched customer journeys may be the topic of the day for most organisations, but very little is documented about dark data and how to unlock and evaluate it. It is no wonder it is such a competitive advantage for the enlightened 2 per cent, who religiously mine their dark data.

Where Exactly Is Dark Data Found and How Can Businesses Access It?

Most companies are dealing with multi-channel communications, possibly omni-channels, and have a stack of telephony across various vendors.

Within the stacks sit the chatbots, IVRs, IVAs, emails, voicemails and the nuances of third-party systems. Let’s call it “dark-data’s lair”.

Every day, dark data languishes undisturbed and concealed within the stack, whirling away accumulating its valuable payload in the background. It is an undiscovered, buried beacon of customer intention and next actions.

Dark data is:

• the pitch and tone of the customer’s voice
• the sentiment behind the verbal or written communication
• the length of silences in a live conversation
• the choice of words and phrases
• their language inferences – authoritative, sarcastic, nonchalant, passive aggressive, dismissive, or hysterical.

Let Us Go Deeper

How can organisations access this critical information? Speech analytics is a good start, but to get to dark data you need to go deeper.

Conversational Intelligence (CI), fuelled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), is the tool for mining dark data. It will detect and discover keywords and phrases, complete thorough analysis of hundreds of thousands records in seconds and bring real-time insights to the surface.

CI will trawl your stacks, including your CRM, analysing all your voice and text data, providing a true picture of the CX estate.

While speech analytics is still a good start, CI will take organisations all the way very quickly.

Interestingly, if not surprisingly, CI entry costs are highly comparable to speech analytics costs. The advantage CI provides is priceless in deciphering converged written, spoken and inferred customer communication and understanding the customer.

2021 has been the year where we have started to see CI making it further up the list of contact centre priorities. Typically, these companies that make it a priority are heavily invested in customer retention and protecting LTV.

They know way in advance if there is a risk they will be dumped, giving them the opportunity and time to rectify matters to circumvent customer attrition.

Author: Guest Author