What do your customers really think about you?

Williams saw that happen with a customer, a quick-service restaurant, in mid-2009. The restaurant had piloted a new hoagie/submarine sandwich. There wasn’t a specific survey question about the sandwich, but customers offered their opinion anyway. While there were numerous positive customer comments, there were also several different comments complaining about the bread, sauce or other matters—all of which pointed to the need for more consistent training on how to make the sandwich, according to Williams.

Past-due too

Customer sentiment is also an important issue when trying to collect on past-due accounts, according to Guy Benham, process improvement manager for British Gas.

The most recent recession was a worldwide phenomenon. So, like U.S. utilities, British Gas ran into collection issues with its customers. The utility had tried several ways to improve collections with only a modicum of success. Much of the success of the collection effort is determined by the interactions between the call center/collection agents and the customers. But the utility could only sample a relatively small percentage of the calls, which could prove too few to provide a good overview of those interactions. So the utility looked into speech analytics, selecting a system from CallMiner that would analyze all calls and dissect not only the language the customer and the call center/collection agents were using, but also the tonality and emphasis on different words.

British Gas took that information to build empathy scores for their agents. The higher the score, the better the agent’s collection expense tended to be. From that information, the utility has been taking the techniques and speech from the top scoring agents to help train other agents and to improve collections. The program is in its pilot stages, and Benham expects to use the experience to help improve customer service throughout the organization.

“Speech analytics isn’t something else for us to do,” Benham says. “It’s a tool that can help us achieve all of the things that we are trying to do, and is likely to help with the things that we haven’t even thought about doing yet.”

The experience of British Gas is typical, because determining customer sentiment and leveraging the information are relatively new uses of knowledge management. But, like British Gas, many firms expect to gain more from that knowledge as customer sentiment programs evolve.