5 Ways to Use Sentiment Analysis in Contact Centres

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.

Reviewed by: Jo Robinson