How To Use Keyword Spotting In Call Recordings To Boost Customer Retention & Increase Profits

While most businesses prioritize new customer acquisition, it is customer retention that presents a proverbial jackpot in terms of how valuable a customer is for an organization. Existing customers:

• Will buy from you again with a 70% likelihood while new customers opening their wallet is only going to happen between 5-20% of the time (Textedly).
• Will on average spend 31% to 67% more than new customers.
• Are willing to try out new products half of the time.
• Have a Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) that is ten times as high as their first purchase.

As a result, organizations that can raise their customer retention rate by only 5% reap profit increases of 25-95%. Therefore, it is surprising that, according to Neil Patel, US companies are annually losing 83 billion dollars due to poor customer service as they fail to establish adequate customer retention strategies.

Why Contact Centers Are Essential To Customer Retention

Contact centers are the epicenter of customer experience improvement opportunities, with hundreds or thousands of customer interactions a day. Yet, while they are often drowning in data, they are starving for insights.

Each agent speaks to dozens of customers and knows the issues that are ultimately causing customers to switch to a competitor. But as a whole, it has been difficult to connect the proverbial dots to make those insights available to the organization's sales, product development, marketing, and customer success teams.

Thankfully, with MiaRec's advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence-driven Voice Analytics platform you can now automatically detect certain keywords and phrases in your call recording transcripts. For example, phrases like "arrived broken", "broken again", "bag was ripped", "damaged box", and so on could indicate mishandling by the shipping company or poor packaging which needs to be addressed immediately. 

Within MiaRec, you can define a preset list of keywords and key phrases and assign them to a specific category and topic to be able to see which (and how many) calls are about a specific topic. This allows you to quickly identify any growing trends and developments over time. 

Let's have a look at some specific ways keyword spotting enables you to retain more customers, improve customer service experiences, and increase your profits.  Of course, there are a lot more ways that you can use keyword spotting, but these five examples are a great start.

1. Fix A Bad Customer Experience Quickly

One of the quickest and easiest ways to use keyword spotting to increase customer retention is to identify conversations that require special follow-up! According to American Express, 33% of US American customers would consider switching brands after only a single bad experience and, according to Microsoft, “58% of consumers choose to switch companies because of poor customer service experience.”

If your customers have mentioned words and phrases like "angry", "upset", "bad experience", "want a refund", "switching to [competitor name]", "never buying ... again", and so on, you can have MiaRec flag these conversations for follow-up. This could include compensation for the bad experience, a discount coupon, an offer for a refund, or something else that is appropriate. This could also be used to flag these contacts so they can be excluded from general marketing campaigns and added to a special marketing nurture workflow. 

2. Offer Loyalty Discounts Or Other Incentives

You don't have to wait for a bad experience to happen before you make your customers feel special. You could also use the same strategy to say "Thank You" to customers who have referred you to a friend or promoted your business in another way. 

Use MiaRec Keyword Spotting to listen for keywords and phrases such as "referred to a friend", "referral program", and others along those lines to identify customers who have shared or would be willing to share their good experiences. In addition, you can train your agents to promote your customer loyalty program which could trigger a follow-up for your marketing team to send more information about the topic. 

3. Tailor Your Communication

No one likes to be spoken to like they are a stranger. This is especially true for your customers. Because MiaRec's AI-based speech engine transcribes and categorizes conversations based on keywords mentioned, you can learn more about what makes your customers tick, and tailor your communication accordingly. 

Consider this short-term example of the benefits of tailored communication. Suppose a bank suddenly receives a large volume of phone calls from concerned customers mentioning a spam email. You can send an email to all affected customers and add an announcement in your hold queue sharing more information about that problem. This makes you proactive and your customers feel taken care of. 

4. Value Their Feedback

Your contact center interactions contain an enormous amount of valuable product feedback, feature suggestions, and even ways to use your product that you haven't thought about yet. All of this information could create a new market opportunity for you. You could also identify possible issues with your pricing (e.g., "too expensive", "too much money", "[competitor] costs less", and "high costs"). 

By listening to their feedback, you are not only gaining useful insights, but also making your customers feel heard and appreciated which in turn improves customer retention. 

5. Build Customer Trust & Long-Term Relationships

Trust is all about reliability, credibility, empathy, and listening to your customer. If you want to increase customer retention long-term, training your agents to build long-term relationships and customer trust is crucial. Keyword spotting can help you not only identify long-term customers, but also better understand what they value most in their relationship with your company. 

Conclusion

Customer retention is crucial to any organization's long-term success as it is more cost-effective, produces faster results, and is more profitable than new customer acquisition. However, providing a great customer experience is essential to keeping your existing customers happy.

Thankfully, with MiaRec's AI-powered Voice Analytics, contact centers are now able to automatically mine call recording transcripts for predefined keywords and phrases to better understand what the call was about. This enables organizations to make up for bad experiences, reward loyalty and referrals, better tailor their communications to their customers' needs,  utilize helpful feedback, and above all, build trust and long-lasting relationships.