Tim Kimber at Vonage explores how sentiment analysis, powered by AI, is transforming contact centres by uncovering customer emotions, improving agent performance, and providing deeper insights into customer interaction.
Sentiment analysis can be used to assess the nature of customer comments in phone calls, text messages, emails, and chat sessions.
These interactions can then be routed, based on the customer’s sentiment, to – for example – agents who are good at empathising and calming unhappy customers.
Sentiment analysis in contact centres has been around for many years, although previously it was typically only available to the largest and most sophisticated sites. This is now changing as technology and AI advancements are bringing this functionality to contact centres of all sizes.
Leveraging Sentiment Analysis in Contact Centres
1. Root Cause Analysis
Utilising sentiment data in contact centre reports can help identify the more obscure interrelationships. For instance, compare a customer’s retention rate with the number of their negative sentiment calls.
Listening to the calls with both negative sentiment and decreased retention will highlight why customers are leaving.
2. Highlight Where Quality Managers Should Be Spending Their Time
It’s simply not practical to listen to every call when quality monitoring. Sentiment analysis helps identify when an agent is involved in a call with negative sentiment, giving Quality Managers pointers on which interactions to review.
3. Uncover Agent Effort Not Captured By Typical Performance Metrics
Call duration is often used as a contact centre KPI, but this can often penalize the best agents who may be dealing with very complex issues while delivering a great customer experience.
Sentiment Analysis can be used to highlight agents that are frequently involved in calls that have positive sentiment so that they can be rewarded – and learned from – as top performing agents.
4. Get a Bigger Voice of the Customer
It’s usually a fairly small percentage of customers who respond to post-call surveys. To supplement surveys, focus groups, and customer advisory results, sentiment analysis data can provide detailed insights into the impact of every contact center interaction.
5. Gauge Marketing Campaign Effectiveness
Sentiment analysis can be used by Sales and Marketing departments to understand how customers are viewing recent advertising campaigns, the effectiveness of sales and marketing messages, and to uncover how the brand is perceived or how sentiment varies by product.
The Benefits of Sentiment in the Contact Centre
Sentiment analysis helps get to the source of customer frustrations and to better understand what delights them.
Be sure to choose a vendor that has a long history of helping to improve customer and agent experiences, is willing to develop a deep knowledge of your business, and will work in partnership to deliver the best outcomes.
This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Vonage – View the Original Article
For more information about Vonage - visit the Vonage Website
About Vonage
Vonage is redefining business communications, helping enterprises use fully-integrated unified communications, contact centre and programmable communications solutions via APIs. Find out more about Vonage
Call Centre Helper is not responsible for the content of these guest blog posts. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of Call Centre Helper.
Author: Vonage
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson
Published On: 24th Mar 2025
Read more about - Guest Blogs, Vonage
