Courtesy: Flickr/Sahaja Meditation

Customer service takes place across many channels these days – the traditional call-in contact center, but also over the Internet through chat, email, and social media. Companies are adapting to that new reality, but perhaps not yet leveraging as well as they might the insight they’re gaining from these many mediums in ways that can benefit all customers’ experiences, rather than just solve problems on an individual basis.

Perhaps that can start to change, as text and sentiment analytics vendors pair up with some of the big players with software for analyzing customer interaction recordings – which is starting to happen with last week’s announcement that Clarabridge and call center workforce optimization vendor Verint have paired up their technology capabilities to understand interactions across talk and text channels.

“For years, customer insight has been trapped in a black hole called the contact center. Customers share their feelings and opinions with companies and that information often gets buried. When information is extracted, through analysis of agent’s call notes or voice recordings, it’s generally used within the call center — for quality control, coaching, and training,” says Bruce Temkin, Customer Experience Transformist and Managing Partner at The Temkin Group.

“But the contact center represents an important window to the customer; which is getting wider as many contact centers expand into chat, email, and social media. Leading companies are realizing that the contact center is a critical ‘listening post’ for gaining critical feedback from customer, for understanding the voice of the customer.”

Integrating Clarabridge’s technology through its APIs to Verint’s systems is an attempt to close the loop between the internal data that is easy for companies to acquire with the external feeds across the vast planes of social media for early detection of potential issues with big impact.

“What we do is very granular because we look at every clause in every sentence in every document and associate metadata with each clause, and store that mapping of what is being discussed, what it relates to and what is the tone of each of those discussions” for later querying and reporting, Clarabridge CEO Sid Banerjee told The Semantic Web Blog a few months back. So, a hotel call center rep may flag incoming calls during a certain period that the rooms were not as clean as expected, and Clarabridge can pull into its analytics travel reviews in the same timeframe from a site like Trip Advisor, which often associated the name of the poster, date of experience, and quantitative information such as scores with the text entry, that show the same negative discussions and impressions. Being able to flag and verify potential issues across several types of listening posts can be the trigger to action.

Clarabridge thinks this is the first marriage of its kind for marrying speech analytics with deep text and sentiment analytics. How do experts think the marriage stacks up? “The Verint-Clarabridge partnership is a step in the direction of unlocking customer insight in the contact center. By combining the ability to analyze call recordings as well as textual data from emails, chat sessions, and social media, companies can now get a much more comprehensive view of what customers are saying,” says Temkin.

He thinks the offering does a good job of embedding Clarabridge within the Verint platform and allowing users to analyze each of the channels individually. Still, we’re just at the start of this on-ramp. Says Temkin, “To be truly game changing, the platform will need deeper level of integration; allowing customers to discover and dive into topics across all of their contact center interactions — and linking that information with customer insights they gather outside of the contact center.”

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