Listening to the voice of the customer

Smarter Consumer Insight

Instrumented: Data from customer phone calls is automatically transcribed into text and linked in a data warehouse with contact center notes, social media traffic and structured data from CRM systems.

Interconnected: An automated process manages all these types of data through the entire analytics lifecycle, resulting in right-time dashboard reports that highlight patterns and trends in consumer behavior.

Intelligent: Combining and analyzing structured and unstructured data helps predict consumer-related issues and respond to them more effectively, as well as provide valuable new insights for clients.

Founded in 1980, Telerx is one of the world’s most innovative contact center outsourcing providers. It operates from five locations in the United States, and also has contact center teams working at client sites across the country. The company employs over 1,700 people and specializes in providing services to clients in the pharmaceuticals and consumer products sectors.

Two years ago, Telerx began working on a major initiative that aimed to transform its business model and help it gain competitive advantage in an evolving market.

Gary Weber, Director of Data Services at Telerx, explains: “Consumers today have many more options for providing feedback on their purchases than they did in the past. Traditional contact center providers can help their clients handle incoming calls, such as when a consumer phones the helpline number listed on a product’s packaging – but services like Twitter and Facebook, which enable consumers to share their opinions in a much more public way, are becoming an increasingly popular channel for consumer feedback.

“We realized that our future needed to embrace all the ways that consumers communicate with companies, and with each other. And we realized that by providing analytics services that reveal new insights into how consumers view our clients and their products, we could gain a significant head start on our competitors.”

Finding a solution

In order to develop an analytics capability that would deliver genuine value to its clients, Telerx recognized that it needed to invest on all fronts: not just in technology, but in the skills and expertise necessary to turn raw data into valuable insight.

“We wanted to work with the leading experts in the field, and IBM Global Business Services was our first choice,” says Gary Weber. “We’ve developed a close partnership with the IBM team, and they have helped us explore every aspect of advanced analytics – the technology, the strategic approach, the corporate and data governance requirements. Their wealth of insight and talent enabled us to jump-start our analytics initiative, and ever since they have acted as nearly a one-stop shop for all our needs.”

Listening to the voice of the customer

Telerx evaluated a wide range of vendors and technologies, and ultimately decided to build a solution based on IBM Business Analytics software. The company had three critical requirements: the solution needed to be able to analyze unstructured text as well as structured CRM data; it needed to support advanced predictive modeling and forecasting; and it needed to provide a way to unlock the value of the thousands of voice recordings that Telerx makes every day during phone calls with consumers.

“You sometimes hear market research companies talking about ‘the voice of the customer‘,” comments Gary Weber. “Well, we actually have the voice of the customer; we just needed to find a way to analyze it. By implementing an automated voice transcription solution, we have been able to convert it into text, which can be processed by the same technologies that we use to analyze social media content and notes from our contact centre operatives.”

Taking a technical perspective

The solution – known as “Beacon” – is built around a suite of products from IBM and its partners. Data from social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs and forums is gathered and loaded into IBM Social Media Analytics (formerly IBM Cognos Consumer Insight) for sentiment analysis, which allows Telerx to be more agile and responsive to consumer public opinions expressed on these social media channels. Voice recordings are automatically transcribed by IBM Transcription Server (iTrans) and Attila, a large vocabulary transcription engine jointly developed by IBM Research and Nuance, IBM’s preferred Business Partner for speech and voice technologies. The transcripts are added to a data mart, together with structured call notes made by call center operatives and other data from clients’ CRM systems.

Telerx’s dedicated team of analytics experts uses IBM SPSS Modeler Premium to mine the unstructured data for insights, using custom models developed for each of its clients to analyze expressions of brand loyalty, positive or negative sentiment, and consumer behavior patterns. The company also plans to use IBM Cognos Business Intelligence to present the results as a series of intuitive graphical reports that will make it easy for clients to understand complex statistical data and take appropriate actions.

“The text mining engine is really the heart of the solution,” explains Gary Weber. “We ran proofs of concept for both SPSS and another leading product, and our data scientists and analysts felt that SPSS was easier to use. We also liked the fact that its modular architecture allowed us to start small, with the components we needed most, instead of having to invest heavily in features that we might not actually need. Finally, the ease of integration with the Cognos software was a major selling point.”

Harnessing talent and building capabilities

“It’s not just about good software – advanced analytics also requires an investment in people,” Gary Weber continues. “IBM provided statisticians to bolster and develop our in-house resources, and consultants to help us build a methodology that ties analytics to business needs. The level of staffing that IBM delivered has been absolutely exceptional, at all levels from the senior consultants to the technical specialists. We really felt that the IBM team was bringing the collective might of IBM to bear on our project, doing whatever was necessary to ensure its success.”

Revealing new insights

With the solution in place and the analytics team assembled, Telerx is now able to generate insights that help to explain consumer behavior and provide a sound basis for clients to make better decisions about product development and customer service.

“The ability to analyze the transcripts of customer phone calls has been an absolute game-changer,” says Gary Weber. “Human speech is an incredibly rich source of insight. On average, we obtain more than twice as much data on customer emotions, behaviors and concepts from our voice-to-text solution than we get from either social media or contact center notes.”

For example, one of Telerx’s clients was launching a new snack product, which was packaged in individual servings and marketed primarily to health-conscious female consumers. Staff in the contact center were given a script that allowed them to categorize different types of feedback on the product – whether they liked it, whether they would buy it again, what they thought about the flavor, and so on. However, one of the most common responses was something that the client’s market research team had not anticipated: a significant number of consumers loved the product so much that they wanted to be able to share it with their families. They wanted it to be sold in family-sized packs instead of individual servings.

“The contact center operatives couldn’t record this opinion because it wasn’t an option in any of the drop-down lists in the questionnaire they were using – nobody had even considered it!” explains Gary Weber. “It was only when we ran the call transcripts through our solution that the insight was revealed. We showed the client that there was a real desire in the market for their product – they just needed to change the packaging.”

Predicting trends in customer feedback

Another surprising outcome of unifying contact center data and social media data within a single analytics platform has been a new ability to predict call volumes and help staff prepare to deal with specific issues, as Gary Weber explains:

“We’ve found that social media is a great predictor of call volumes and hot topics – and this is a huge advantage because it helps us with operational planning. If people are suddenly tweeting about a problem with one of our clients’ products, we can ensure that we have enough operatives available the next day to handle an increased volume of calls. We can also alert the client to the issue, and discuss an appropriate response. Then we can brief all of our operatives on how to handle the situation. In many cases, we’re able to get a solution in place before the phones start ringing.”

Clients appreciate Telerx’s ability to take a proactive approach to customer service. “Analytics is becoming a key differentiator between us and our more traditional competitors in the contact center services sector,” concludes Gary Weber. “And this is just the beginning. Over the next few months we’ll be reviewing our roadmap with IBM and deciding which upcoming projects should be our top priorities. For one thing, we’re eager to use what we’ve learned from analytics in the consumer products sector and extend a similar set of services to our clients in the pharmaceuticals industry. We’re also excited about operationalizing analytics – for example, giving our contact center operatives access to real-time analytical data, while they’re on the phone to customers.

“It was only when we started to unlock the potential of analytics that we began to understand what we could achieve. IBM has been a wonderful partner to guide us on this journey.”

About IBM Business Analytics

IBM Business Analytics software delivers data-driven insights that help organizations work smarter and outperform their peers. This comprehensive portfolio includes solutions for business intelligence, predictive analytics and decision management, performance management, and risk management.

Business Analytics solutions enable companies to identify and visualize trends and patterns in areas, such as customer analytics, that can have a profound effect on business performance. They can compare scenarios, anticipate potential threats and opportunities, better plan, budget and forecast resources, balance risks against expected returns and work to meet regulatory requirements. By making analytics widely available, organizations can align tactical and strategic decision-making to achieve business goals.

For more information

For further information or to reach a representative please visit ibm.com/business-analytics.

To learn more about Telerx solutions, please visit www.telerx.com