Miscommunication between your customers and your contact center can be disastrous for your company. In fact, one study found that customer confusion significantly worsens negative word-of-mouth and reduces customers’ likelihood of repurchasing your product.
Customer confusion isn’t uncommon in the customer journey, whether it’s a new product feature, a change in pricing, or unexpected delays. Customers often become frustrated and angry when they don’t understand something related to your brand.
If you want to avoid disasters, improve customer satisfaction, build trust, and deliver the best service, you need to be aware of customer confusion and take steps to reduce it wherever possible.
In this article, we will explain what customer confusion is, how it fits into the customer experience (CX), and how you can identify confused customers in your contact center interactions.
How Clarity and Confusion Fit into Customer Experience
Being clear helps your agents keep customers satisfied and conversations short. Similar to other attributes of high-quality customer support, clarity translates into savings and increased revenue for your company.
Clarity is one of the qualities that most customer experience organizations check for as part of their quality assurance (QA) program. It’s common to see line items in QA scorecards such as:
➡️ “Did the agent provide clear and coherent replies throughout the conversation?”
➡️ “Did the agent exhibit clear written communication?”
➡️ “Did the agent clearly explain the solution to the customer?”
➡️ “Did the agent avoid technical jargon and explain terms clearly?”
➡️ “Did the agent answer the customer’s question without leaving any ambiguity?”
Understanding Where Confusion Occurs in Customer Conversations
Listening to what your customers say is a good first step, as they often express confusion, say they don’t understand something, and ask for clarification.
Finding conversations where confusion happens uncovers opportunities for business-wide improvements, including:
✔️ Coaching a particular agent.
✔️ Understanding if some topics drive more confusion than others.
✔️ Editing your agent macros and ensuring contact center articles are more explicit.
✔️ Improving your onboarding and sign-up process.
Continuous improvement is the key to achieving clarity and reducing incidents of confusion across the thousands or millions of interactions you have with consumers.
For example, let’s say your subscription-based business receives calls from customers asking why they’ve been charged repeatedly. Many of your customers are unaware that their subscription automatically renews after their trial period ends or at the end of each billing cycle.
The root cause could be that your auto-renewal process isn’t communicated clearly enough during sign-up, and your reminder emails about upcoming charges are too vague.
A solution would be to update your sales and sign-up process to include a bold, visible notice that explains the subscription will automatically renew and the terms of this. Your process should make things like the renewal date and pricing clear before the customer completes their purchase.
⚠️ The Problem with Identifying Customer Confusion
Finding the conversations where customers are confused presents another problem.
You could search your transcripts for common phrases a customer would say to express confusion. However, sifting through thousands of conversations is time-consuming, and searching text may not accurately identify the right conversations. This is especially true if you’re not using artificial intelligence (AI) to help you identify these customer interactions.
The issue is that human language is infinitely rich—the same idea can be expressed in hundreds of different ways, so attempting to come up with your own searches is too expensive.
Taking an AI approach to uncovering customer confusion
By looking for phrases that demonstrate a lack of understanding and need more direction, we can more accurately and completely address conversations involving confused customers.
However, searches using keywords would either return too many irrelevant interactions or miss interactions that don’t use that specific keyword.
At Loris, our AI identifies turns of phrase that customers use in relevant conversations, marks where they happen, and surfaces them to the user—-we call them “Conversation Markers”.
One of the conversation markers we added to our library is “Confusion.” It captures the various phrases customers use to express confusion and misunderstanding. “Confusion,” like all other conversation markers, can be used in filters in Loris QA to find conversations to review.
Conversations identified by our Confusion Conversation Marker
Remember how I said there are hundreds of ways to express the same idea in a human language? Here are just some examples of customer messages from real support conversations that the Confusion Conversation Marker found:
The Clearest Way to Identify a Confused Customer
If you want to take an AI approach to customer service interactions, then there are a few things you need to get started:
Collect all your customer interactions
The first and most obvious need is customer conversations, whether voice calls, email interactions, or chat transcripts. If you want to find relevant conversations that express confusion, you need a conversation intelligence platform like Loris that will analyze each and every interaction your contact center handles.
A team to fix issues
Next, you need a team responsible for triaging these incidents as they occur, typically QA managers and analysts.
Beyond bringing awareness to these issues, this group can also affect change that removes or lessens confusion through agent coaching and retraining.
Your conversation intelligence platform will automatically help you identify issues—like the root cause of customer confusion—and provide actionable insights into dealing with these issues in real-time.
Involve leadership for business-wide improvements
Once you have these actionable insights, you need to involve leaders in your company to address customer confusion. Whether that’s your head of CX or chief customer officer, your team needs to work on the root cause of customer confusion because your entire organization plays a role in the customer experience.
For example, if customer confusion stems from an issue with your product, your leaders have the authority to ensure your product team acts on the changes recommended by your customer service department.
Leaders can ensure these changes are communicated to relevant other parts of your business, such as your marketing team. Your marketing department may want to announce your product improvements to your customers to demonstrate that you’re continuously improving your offer.
The Perfect Platform for Identifying Confused Customers
Confused customers can be disastrous for your business, leading to decreased customer satisfaction, a lack of trust in your brand, and overall frustration with your customer service.
Loris is an AI-powered conversation intelligence platform that helps you identify conversations in which customers are confused and learn the root cause of their confusion.
Understanding the root cause of a customer complaint and sharing these insights with your entire company can help you improve your CX.
Speak to a Loris expert today to see how AI conversation intelligence can help you remove confusion and level up your CX.
