EY teams started by creating a “book of record” around the entirety of an agent’s interaction with a client. They captured what happened before and after across various channels – from what emails were sent and calls made, to cases opened and sales recorded.
In tandem, they used natural language processing (NLP) techniques to extract nuanced qualitative and unstructured insights from agents‘ conversations, such as topics discussed, talk track utilized and call outcome. This made it possible to gauge how agents responded to certain customer situations; whether they were invested in understanding the client’s specific situation; how they were talking about product features and functionality; and whether they were carrying out robust follow-up activity. Leveraging NLP methods overcame the data quality issues that typically drive down the performance of keyword-based approaches. These often yield unsatisfactory results due to issues including mis-transcription and contextually similar word variants.
“By addressing the quality issues inherent in conversations recorded by legacy systems and over-reliance on keywords, we were able to identify very subtle signals with a very high level of accuracy,” says Sameer Gupta, EY North America Financial Services Organization Advanced Analytics Leader.
Together with structured metrics, these foundational insights were tied to overall progression and outcome, for example, a sale recorded.
Using a variety of techniques to improve links between unstructured and structured data sets, EY teams were able to tie the foundational NLP insights to overall progression, thereby identifying gaps and opportunities by progression stage. In addition to agent-level insights, the approach helped understand and collate behaviors and methods correlated to impactful conversations and successful outcomes. The next step was to distill these insights into an interactive review dashboard. Developed with input from the client’s operations team and the end users to encourage adoption, it provides customized views for agents and team leaders that can be refreshed daily or when required.