Research I have conducted into the Contact Center market over the last five years shows that today customers really are interacting with companies through more and more channels, everything from telephone calls, e-mails, letters, faxes, surveys, instant message sessions, web-based self-service, and mobile text messages. On top of this a much newer form of interaction has sprung up – social media sites that not only let customers interact direct with companies but allow them to open up conversations about the company, many of which are not so complimentary and can easily result from poor interactions through other channels. Companies need to capture and analyse all these forms of interactions so they can truly know what customers are saying about them.

This represents quite a challenge since many of these interactions are in freeform text and many, such as social media sites, are outside the company’s firewall. Given the volumes of these interactions, it is unrealistic to expect someone to monitor all the channels, read through them all to spot which ones are important and to then raise appropriate actions. The answer lies in automating the process. One of perhaps the lesser known vendors with a product that can help is Overtone. Its product, Open Mic, includes features that allow companies to capture all forms of text, analyse the content for words, phrases, themes and sentiment, and raise alerts when business rules are met, so that someone is prompted to take action. The text can originate from any channel; with the latest version (4.6) offering several new capabilities that directly relate to monitoring social media sites. The new dashboards can highlight the overall sentiment being expressed on various sites, who the authors are, which sites are most active and what customers are “chatting” about. The real-time monitoring features allow companies to get an early warning of common themes and issues that are building up.

The product is available as a Software-as-a-Service, so companies can get up and running in a very short order of time, with low risk and upfront investment.

I have written quite a lot about the growing importance of the “voice of the customer” and done research on customer experience management the need for companies to have as complete as possible picture of their customers. Today that picture needs to include content and information derived from text-based interactions, and content captured from social media sites. Overtone is one of the first vendors to understand the importance of this and so we recommend that companies wanting to improve their view of their customers, and be armed with the information to drive improvements to the customer experience, take a look at what its product can do.

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Regards,

Richard Snow – VP & Research Director