May 23rd, 2022

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Reading Customer Mood as a Call Center Rep: with Emotion AI, It’s a Snap

Increasing numbers of businesses are using Emotion AI to analyze customer mood and satisfaction in the call center to help ensure customer experience with company telephone representatives (TeleReps) is optimized. 

Essentially, the AI tech transforms the computers running a call center into a warm receptionist; continually gaining deeper insights into a customer’s likes, dislikes, personality type, and emotional responses with every new call center interaction.

Over time, this sustained the ‘getting-to-know-you’ element of Emotion AI which enables a customer to feel that the company they’re calling truly understands who they are and how they like to be serviced.

Properties of the Human Voice Understood 

Emotion AI works by analyzing the detailed components of a customer’s conversation. Voice, tone, pauses, rate, volume, and similar characteristics are reviewed and the AI advises the call center rep on the best way to handle that customer based on what’s discerned. Some Emotion AI systems track as many as 200 or more subtle characteristics of the human voice in their analysis.  

Some are programmed to continually reassess a customer’s spoken words as often as every three seconds. The result is a call center representative augmented with Emotion AI that can quickly make the right moves with a customer, in ways that previously may have seemed baffling.

For instance an Emotion AI system can be programmed to prompt a call center rep to offer a $20 gift certificate or similar in certain situations when a business has clearly made a mistake and the Emotion AI system has concluded that in this interaction with this particular customer, offering a tangible amends to resolve the matter will work wonders.

 

Get to the Right Help Quickly 

Emotion AI systems can also prompt a call center rep to reach-out to a supervisor in certain situations when it’s clear the call center rep does not have the tools needed to solve a specific problem or specific situation.

Moreover, on a more basic level, Emotion AI systems can offer ‘running commentary’ on a call such as continually alerting the call center rep on the customer’s changing mood, whether that be calm, happy, sad, anxious, strongly engaged, or similar.

Aids in Upselling Products or Services 

If a representative is looking to sell more features or services to a customer they can use the data from the Emotion AI and stay in the same conversational mode if the customer is responding to or strongly engaged with the sales pitch. The rep can pivot to a completely different sales approach if Emotion AI is signaling that the customer is distracted or bored.

For some Emotion AI systems, running commentary often comes in the form of quick text bubbles, which pop-up on screen as a representative talks with a customer. Other times, emoticons signifying customer feelings pop-up on screen both types of prompts can be used. 

But perhaps one of the greatest strengths of an Emotion AI system is that over time, they become ever-more trusted advisors to call representatives; relentlessly analyzing each and every customer conversation and improving interactions with the next customer, each and every day.

Aid in Improved Decision Making Among Call Staff 

Emotion AI systems seasoned over time are perfect for new hires who may be struggling to make the right decisions as they learn on the job. Moreover with Emotion AI employees may gain the confidence that they have something to aid them continually. Offering the kind of advice that comes with months or years of experience. 

In fact, some well seasoned Emotion AI systems also have the option to call-up a complete historical analysis of a specific customer’s interaction with a business and immediately route that customer to a call center’s rep whose personality is predisposed to work in harmony with that customer.

Still other Emotion AI systems can be configured to ‘translate’ cultural cues so that a call rep in Thailand, India, Argentina, for example, will be able to ‘read’ the culturally specific emotional cues that may be missed by someone who is from a different region than they are.

Customize Your Call Center Emotional AI 

Emotion AI systems can be customized to sense and analyze any number of specific emotional cues that you and a behavioral specialist consider to be critical to your business. They can be customized to generate any number of specific prompts you need to ensure that your call center reps come off to customers as masters of empathy.

Besides improving on the performance of call center reps, Emotion AI systems are also a boon to managers who are looking to get a comprehensive analysis of how things are going in the call center, what’s working, what’s not, where changes are needed and the like.

 

For example, Emotion AI systems can generate written and visual reports of each customer interaction with the call center. Including words used, customer reactions to those words and call center rep decisions based on those words, which yielded the optimum results sought by the business.

Plus, Emotion AI systems can also score the overall customer satisfaction rate of any call center, identify who the star customer reps are and pin-point call center reps who may need more training and guidance to do their best.

Consider Emotional AI for Your Call Center Reps

As in the phrase, best-of-breed, Emotion AI system providers are already well aware of the kind of comprehensive analytical reports a call center manager is going to be looking for from such systems. And those reports are either already built-into their systems or they can be easily added to their solutions.

Of course, if you’re considering adding an Emotion AI system to your call center, your best move is to work with an AI consultant who has an extremely deep knowledge of the AI genre and can help you put together the best possible solution for your particular needs.