Let’s cut to the chase: customer service is a hard job. As an agent, you never know what’s waiting for you in the queue. A customer may have a quick and simple question…or maybe not. Chances are they’re chatting in with something they can’t solve themselves, so they may be frustrated before you even have the chance to greet them. This can be a tall hill to climb.
We’ve talked a bit about Customer Sentiment Detection and how it helps agents quickly assess how a customer may be feeling at the beginning of the conversation and how those feelings may change as the conversation moves along.
With this insight, agents are empowered to course correct in real time and create empathic experiences that boost loyalty, retention, and even repeat sales.
We thought it’d be fun to take a look at how customer sentiment influences (and assists!) the agent’s performance.
With insight into customer sentiment, agents can more confidently command the interaction. They see a graph illustrating how the customer’s sentiment changes during the chat, and then respond and solve the issue at hand, while also matching (or de-escalating!) the customer’s tone.
Once you’ve collected sentiment data, you can use it to answer a number of questions that can improve internal processes and help frontline agents grow, too.
- How is the customer feeling about the reason they’re contacting us today? Is their sentiment directed towards the service, the product, or something else?
- How do agents diffuse a rough situation? Are they equipped to solve problems?
- Are customers extra frustrated when contacting us about certain issue categories?
Powerful stuff!
And have you heard it can take just one bad experience to lose a customer? So a holistic view of the customer experience—one that helps you establish realistic performance goals for your team and shines a light on how the customer feels about your brand—is more important than ever.
Frontline agents are the face of the company. They’re talking to customers all day every day and have insight into customer sentiment that typically isn’t evident to sales, marketing, and product folks. The way we see it, it’s time to move away from labeling customer service agents as scapegoats. We ought to recognize them as the G.O.A.T (greatest of all time).
We could talk about this stuff all day—click here to connect with our team and learn more
