Dive Brief:
- Three-quarters of CX and contact-center professionals say that feedback surveys alone are insufficient for a holistic understanding of customer experience, according to a survey released by Medallia earlier this month.
- Fewer than three in five CX practitioners with customer feedback or NPS survey programs also say they use conversational data, such as transcripts and summaries from customer-service interactions, according to the survey of more than 500 CX and customer service professionals.
- Conversational intelligence, which relies on AI to generate insights into call transcripts, helps fill in the gaps left by surveys — but it doesn’t necessarily power a deep dive into the experience by itself, according to Brian Cantor, managing director of digital at Customer Management Practice.
Dive Insight:
Conversational intelligence can help fill in the gaps in insight left by traditional surveys, and merging the two approaches can help leaders craft better experiences.
Perfection is impossible in customer experience, so knowing what went wrong and how badly it affected the customer is valuable insight. Conversational intelligence is well-suited for unearthing this information, according to Cantor.
One common problem with surveys is that only the most motivated customers, typically the happiest and least happy, are the ones taking the time to fill them out, according to Cantor. Conversational intelligence can help teams discover satisfaction patterns across all customers to better determine what is or isn’t working.
“You still don't want to ignore outcomes, you don't want to ignore survey scores, you don't want to ignore CSAT or net promoter, but you want to have a deeper sense of what's driving those outcomes and what's controllable,” Cantor told CX Dive.
Conversational intelligence also offers the benefits of scale and speed, according to Andrew Custage, senior Director and head of research insights at Medallia. While surveys offer structured feedback, AI can process unstructured data in real time.
“This allows organizations to act while the customer is still engaged with an agent, rather than waiting for periodic reviews that may happen days or weeks later,” Custage told CX Dive in an email. “AI is also essential for making sense of open-ended and unbiased feedback in these conversations, which creates a more complete and holistic view of the customer experience than surveys alone can provide.”
Conversational intelligence can help trace when customers are hanging up on calls, whether the interaction was with an agent or a chatbot, and help leaders determine how to better design the experience, according to Cantor. Opportunities range from improving the guardrails on AI agents to adjusting employee training to help them tackle common pitfalls when dealing with customers.
The role of conversational intelligence is expected to grow in the coming year, with 64% of CX practitioners and 57% of contact-center practitioners expecting increased investment, according to Medallia’s survey.
Two-thirds of respondents cite AI’s advances in making data usable as the reason for this increase.
