Industry research indicates it can cost up to five times more to attract a new customer than it does to keep an existing one.

The benefits of nurturing your customers and earning their loyalty are well known, both for your organisation’s reputation and its bottom line. But sometimes just one bad experience can lead to customer churn. Thankfully, there are some easy tools contact centres can use to help reduce the risk of churn and spot potential problems before they arise. 

Speech Analytics enables contact centres to collect valuable feedback from thousands, even millions of customer calls, that can be used to assess the perception, performance and potential pain points of your products and services. It works by transcribing and analysing 100 per cent of your recorded calls to identify important keywords, phrases, categories and themes. The frequency and use of these can then be monitored over time by agents and supervisors via a dashboard within your contact centre solution. 

So how can you use Speech Analytics to reduce customer churn? 

1. Spot problems before they escalate

The keywords and phrases surfaced by Speech Analytics can help you understand how your brand, product and/or service is perceived by your customers. This data can be monitored in real-time, or over weeks and months, to help you track customer satisfaction or discontent. If certain words begin to be used more often, such as ‘down’, ‘broken’ or ‘blackout’, this could be an early warning sign that something needs to be rectified. You could also go deeper, mining the finer details of your recorded calls to understand how your customers are feeling about individual features of your products or service. 

2. Spot opportunities for campaigns and sales

As well as spotting potential problems, Speech Analytics can also help you spot opportunities to delight and engage with your customers. Are your customers asking a lot of questions about a specific product? Could you capitalise on that demand with a giveaway, campaign or sale? Happy customers will tell an average of nine people about a positive experience they’ve had with a brand and Speech Analytics can help you spot those opportunities for deeper relationship building interactions [2]. 

3. Understand what drives your customers’ loyalty

What is it about your organisation that your customers love? And what stops them from switching to your competitors? Speech Analytics can help you identify the key drivers behind your customers’ loyalty and the differentiators you should be promoting to reduce customer churn. 

This would be especially valuable for contact centres working in the retail, manufacturing and travel and hospitality industries, which tend to have the lowest customer retention rates. A 2018 survey conducted by Statista found the hospitality, travel and restaurant industries had a customer retention rate of just 55%, while retail and manufacturing fared only slightly better with 63% and 67% respectively. 

4. Pinpoint the root cause of a customer’s concern

Puzzel Speech Analytics includes a unique ‘TellMeWhy’ feature that can help organisations quickly identify potential underlying root causes for specific calls. This could raise critical information that may not be apparent to agents, such as repeated references to a competitor’s offering. Increasing efficiency and reducing handling time will have positive knock-on effects for your contact centre and customers. 

5. Identify pain points in your customer service

Speech Analytics can help you fine-tune your contact centre by identifying any pain points, bottlenecks or barriers in your customer service. From the inside out, it might feel like you’re running a tight ship, but your customers may have a different opinion. Monitoring the frequency of complaints related to long wait times, bad lines or poor service for example, could help you determine where operations are slipping in the eyes of your customers. Ninety-six per cent of customers say customer service plays an important role in determining their loyalty to a brand.

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