Customer Confusion has always been an important aspect to get right when we are discussing a successful customer journey. It can lead to excessively high AHT (average handling time) and customer agitation. Both of which do not provide positive outcomes for the company. 

What is Customer Confusion? In basic terms; it is when a customer is confused by what an agent is saying, whether it be due to a wordy script or perhaps because the agent simply isn’t speaking clearly enough which can result in a complaint or loss of business. 

How is it measured? A lot of companies rely on CRM entries by agents to allow them to discover what customers are having issues with. This does help companies paint a good image of what changes need to be made but normally only one reason can be recorded – so what if the customer advises they are confused more than once? 

How to resolve it? 

Speech Analytics can pick up all instances of Customer Confusion on 100% of your calls. Focusing on all the specific phrases that could be said by the customer; “I don’t understand”, “I don’t get it”, “please explain again”, “you are speaking too fast” the list goes on. Using this information and the pool of calls it derives from allows the user to establish if there are knowledge gaps within the workforce and whether they need to update processes and procedures to help customers on their journey. 

Also, once the changes have been made you can continue to monitor the Customer Confusion rate at a later date and see if the changes bear weight. You never know another issue may have arisen too. 

In this instance, you could build an ‘Opportunity’ category and search for language associated with a sales opportunity. Depending on your business, that could be upgrades or cross-selling, or more nuanced issues, like the customer referring to an old or broken piece of equipment they plan to replace, or a product or service that they weren’t happy with. 

Then, with the key terms identified, the analytics software can examine all relevant call recordings and transcripts to see how often these opportunities occur across the business. Reports can be generated for each advisor. 

How did we resolve it? 

One of our clients was having issues with AHT and wanted to lower it. Upon considering this we discovered that a lot of customers were confused and therefore asking questions about the client’s ‘Direct Debits’, more so than any other topic. Through listening to the specific part of the calls and conducting some root cause analysis we found that it was mainly due to the script/process that was in place. Through careful process mapping, we rectified the error. Although the minority of ‘Direct Debit confusion’ was not caused by the script itself but by the agents for speaking too quickly! This was resolved by reporting and weekly updates on agent tempo (another thing you can monitor with Speech Analytics). The client gained:

• Improved customer journeys. 
• Less friction. 
• Reduction in complaints. 
• More personal/direct feedback for the agents. 
• Less AHT.