A large chunk of a contact center agent's job is the ability to successfully handle myriad types of customers, whether it's a loquacious Lenny, a distressed David, or a sarcastic Sherri. While skills-based routing is important, Mattersight believes that analyzing both caller and agent behavior is vital to engagement. The company recently added several enhancements to its Predictive Behavioral Routing solution, which basically plays matchmaker between the personalities of a customer and an agent.
Mattersight's version 3 of the routing solution uses both behavior analytics and speech analytics and can boost client key performance indicators by 20 to 25 percent versus traditional call routing, the company says. More than 10 million algorithms are applied to data that can identify the personality of callers—the methodology extracts grammar, tone, tempo, and keywords. Those algorithms are used in conjunction with other solutions from the company, such as agent performance applications and predictive models. Once the caller personality has been identified, it goes into Mattersight's database, which holds more than 70 million phone numbers.
Chris Danson, chief technology officer at Mattersight, explains that layering various technologies on top of its speech engine enables the company to find data insights for generating new data. Mattersight takes unstructured data from sources across various channels, including phone, email, and chat.
"We pull that information in and on the call end apply speech technology and linguistic analysis, and tie that to structured data as well to have predictive algorithms and various analysis with that."
Mattersight has analyzed over 1 billion calls and turned the results into structured data that can be leveraged into predictive models. The information can be used to predict churn and level of customer service.
"Most companies [try to figure out] if they provide good customer service [by doing QA on] maybe three calls a month per agent,” Danson says. “That’s giving you a sampling, not really giving you a sense of, predictively, how your customer service is.
"Then they end up surveying customers, but again that's just a sampling. But you can analyze not just a few thousand calls but millions of calls, which provides real statistical trends."
Donna Fluss, founder and president of DMG Consulting, says that using such data to match incoming callers to service providers is an interesting approach, and sees the use of analytics on the rise.
"Contact centers are changing and are using more data to improve their overall performance and effectiveness,” Fluss says. "Analytics is going to play a critically important role in the future for contact centers."