InMoment recently announced the availability of its Active Listening Suite (AL), an analytics tool capable of processing speech from 90 different languages. It will allow contact center agents to give more helpful consultation, instead of canned responses from a script.
Salt Lake City-based InMoment, Inc. develops engagement solutions that better meet the needs of today’s customer. According to its website, InMoment solutions are used by several prominent companies, including Hertz, The Home Depot, Carmax, Panda Express, and Nike.
InMoment presents AL as a solution that is not only thorough, but also provides actionable information. This is done by digging deeper for insightful information. Often customers will give the usual ‘fine’ or ‘great’ when asked about what they thought of a product or service. While such responses are better than irate phone calls, they fail to provide information that helps the company improve its offerings.
Analytics tools in AL recognize bland responses and prompt for more insight: If the service was fine, what did you like about it? What can we do better at? Others have had problems with X, what about you? These analytics can also be customized to respond to certain keywords unique to a company’s line of products and services.
Part of the reason for bland responses is that the questions often don’t speak to the customer’s preferences. This can be in the form of scripted questions and surveys that have good intentions, but fail to get at the root of the problem.
"In a rush to improve customers' experiences, many organizations send a barrage of long surveys focused primarily on what the company wants to know," said InMoment CEO John Sperry. "Active Listening fosters a more human interaction, encouraging customers to share details about their experiences in their own words. As a result, companies receive richer insights, and customers have a more enjoyable experience. It is no longer necessary to sacrifice one for the other."
The consumer world is full of examples of products that took the market by storm when marketed for a purpose other than what they were originally intended for. Play-Doh, for example, was originally designed as wallpaper cleaner. In hindsight, it would have been the height of folly for its makers to survey customers about its effectiveness as wallpaper cleaner when their children used it to mold shapes of animals.
Most businesses probably won’t see the products they sell repurposed in such a radical way, but it shows how valuable a tool like AL is. Technology has advanced to the point where business are no longer limited to the confines of structured data collected from surveys and other forms of canned questions. The customer can speak their mind, businesses can process the information in a meaningful way, and open up possibilities they had not considered before.