Speech Analytics Helps Drive Customer Experience

CSI customer Cigars International (CI) is known for its' wide variety of cigars and their unflappable customer service.

One of the reasons they originally invested in Virtual Observer was because they found an affordable technology which could effectively assist them in achieving their lofty goals for the customer experience.

 With the quality monitoring process on track and continuously improving, CI decided to invest in a more aggressive technology, phonetic-based speech analytics feature of the Virtual Observer suite, to help take the quality assurance process to the next level.

 The return on investment which would come from speech analytics was a great positive change in CI's training model.

 A manager in customer service, speaking for CI, mentioned "We suffered from the 'whisper down the lane' syndrome - even though we were providing comprehensive training materials with talking points, even though we delivered those materials several different ways (classroom, desk side, email), we still found that shortly after training the talking points took on a life of their own and became something else. Often times wrong information would evolve. It would have been days or weeks before we would have uncovered this, however, with Virtual Observer Call Insight speech analytics, it was in one afternoon."

 Read more about how Cigars International surpassed their ambitions for the customer experience.

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Call Quality Monitoring Is More Important Than Ever With Holidays Approaching

Believe it or not, the holiday shopping season is less than one month away (Black Friday), or in some retail outlets, it is already here!.

Reports say that consumer spending in 2010 might be down this season. Other online reports show increased spending for Christmas.


This has some interesting effects in our space: online catalog companies, and e-tailers, are likely to see an increase in call center activity, as shoppers call in with questions, for support, to place orders, etc.; call center operations managers will be challenged to produce -- more upsells, more saves, increased customer satisfaction.


As always, it will also be important to reduce the costs of running the center - less churn of employees, faster training cycles, faster customer handling times, etc.


Virtual Observer has been able to help many e-tailers address these issues and make serious performance gains, including Harry & David, Crutchfield Electronics, Fox Head Inc., Casual Male XL, Cigars International, J&P Cycles and many more.


Do your CSRs enter credit card information on-screen or take credit card information over the phone? It is also mission critical for e-tailers to maintain PCI compliance.


Virtual Observer helps firms remain compliant through the use of 256-bit media encryption and through granular security which allows administrators to control privileges down to the functional level and through our "LightsOut!" functionality, which automatically eliminate sensitive data after it has been entered on the screen.

Related articles

• Bold Software Releases Holiday Readiness 2010 Research Report (prweb.com)
• Retailers ramp up hiring for holiday season (calgaryherald.com)

Growing catalog and internet company uses Virtual Observer for quality training

This came in this week from Stephen McDevitt, Call Center Manager for Cigars International:

"As the Call Center Manager for a growing catalog and internet company, sales call quality and customer service call quality are paramount.

In our industry what separates one company from another is the level of service.

We recognized that in order to raise the bar (to become the company of choice) we need to do something more, continually improve on call quality.

After a lengthy due diligence we chose Coordinated Systems Inc’s Virtual Observer as the application to assist us in our quest to be number one.

Virtual Observer has provided us with exactly what we need to guide our representatives to success.

I have used several applications in my career and this system is as straightforward as you can get.

The support team made training and implementation a breeze; making the bottom line cost of the entire application very affordable."

What preceded this testimonial?

The best kind of lead, a referral from an extremely satisfied customer.