Conversation is the richest source of live customer intelligence available to organisations. What you say to customers and what they say to you are the most accurate indicator of the customer relationship. CA (Conversation Analysis) is the least expensive and most powerful tool for using that resource.
Think about the hype around some of the innovations that are going to impact 2019......there has been a lot. Most major consulting firms, so called industry gurus and other wannabes have come up with predictions for the coming year so here is mine.
This will be the year of conversation analysis. There are 3 elements to this:
Understanding Customer Emotions and basic patterns of conversation simply.
Creating actionable programmes to impact systems and processes.
Deep Dive CA training and acquiring skilled analysts will become a priority shortage by the end of the year.
Why?
Over the last few years we have been working with clients to design and build programmes to teach agents to be more aware of customer emotions and to respond to them better. As part of that work I have identified what is currently best practice in most CX and it's poor.
On the one hand you have ground-breaking work being done by real gurus such as Prof Elizabeth Stokoe that is revolutionising the science of conversation analysis to the point where we can already build AI algorithms that understand conversation and our work at understanding emotional priorities, and on the other hand CX experts who still think this is the 1990's!
This drives me crazy because it doesn't make sense!
We have billions of conversations every day
Improving them is cheap easy to do fast to test and measurable
It represents the best dollar for dollar spend in customer insight because it also improves live outcomes.
Having better conversations reduces Customer and Staff attrition and other costs and improves outcomes.
CA will have an increasing impact on AI, In store, Online, Digital and Contact Centre over the next 2 years
If you are not looking at conversation analysis as a significant way to improve CX in 2019 then you need to start reading and thinking hard about where focus is likely to produce the best results.
It is common sense!