Understanding the voice of the customer is one of the most critical – and challenging – goals for any business leader. Often, the richest, most authentic insights are hidden in customer conversations, offering a far more accurate and representative view of the customer experience than traditional methods like surveys. Yet, despite this untapped potential, many businesses still struggle to leverage these insights effectively.
If you’re a business leader trying to decode the voice of the customer – and understand what to do next – you’ve probably encountered one of these three common challenges:
- Manual call listening
Spending months manually sifting through calls is not only resource-intensive, but also inherently limited. Even the most diligent teams can only process a fraction of conversations, leaving many stones unturned. - Survey-based insights
While surveys are faster than manual reviews, they often suffer from low response rates and delayed feedback cycles, delivering insights weeks or even months after the fact. With this kind of lag time, insights may be completely irrelevant by the time they reach you. Worse, surveys only capture a narrow slice of your customer base, missing critical nuances that live conversations reveal. - Legacy speech analytics
Many organizations have already invested in legacy speech analytics tools, only to find themselves ultimately doubting the accuracy of the data. These systems often fail to provide actionable insights, leaving teams frustrated and leaders hesitant to act on the results.
If any of the above resonates with you, you’re not alone.
That’s why we’re thrilled to announce a new product, AI Analyst, and unveil groundbreaking new capabilities in Cresta’s Insights suite. With these innovations, an organization can transform how the contact center operates – saving time, cutting costs, and unlocking insights you’ve never had before. Let’s get into the details.
Introducing AI Analyst
Cresta’s AI Analyst is your new go-to tool to break down and analyze all customer conversations. Something keeping you up at night that may be affecting your customers?
Just ask AI Analyst.
Instead of waiting weeks for analysis, you can now ask questions in natural language and get answers in minutes, not weeks.
This transformative capability empowers you and your team to:
- Make data-driven decisions faster: Analyze patterns, root causes, and trends across conversations instantly. Ask follow-up questions on any answers you see, and zone in on any insights that stand out to you.
- Act on real-time insights: Use these insights to coach agents, guide conversations, and improve the customer experience.
- Trust your results: With Cresta’s industry-leading AI techniques, you get structured, evidence-backed insights – with a significantly decreased risk of hallucinations.
How AI Analyst Works
AI Analyst doesn’t just summarize conversations, it deeply understands all of the different elements of a conversation. AI Analyst considers:
- Holistic context: Reasons for the conversation, customer intent, sentiment, and emotion.
- Behaviors: Previously unknown patterns of behavior in your agents, and which ones are driving resolution.
- Outcomes: AI-inferred metrics like resolution rates and customer experience.
Actionable patterns: Subtle insights that even manual reviews may miss – and in a fraction of the time.
Powered by Cresta’s proprietary techniques, AI Analyst processes individual conversations one at a time, ensuring that conversations are relevant to the questions you pose. Answers are grounded in evidence from your conversations, bolstered by AI reasoning and evidence citations for added trust.
Cresta’s approach drastically cuts hallucination risk, giving you confidence in the answers you receive and the actions you’ll take.
Use these insights immediately to enact change across the organization with coaching, quality management, real-time agent assist, and virtual agent automations – all in the same platform where those insights live.
“Metrigy’s research shows that more than 50% of companies are relying on AI-based interaction analytics—and for good reason,” says Robin Gareiss, CEO of Metrigy. “This data is golden, providing rich insights into the actual customer experience. Cresta’s AI Analyst provides a way for any employee to probe into customer interactions and learn the root cause of emerging trends. The approach Cresta has designed to analyze the data results in more accurate answers from the LLM, which is obviously key as companies take action on the findings.”
Real-Life Stories from the Front Line
These features have already been successfully implemented with select customers, delivering excellent results and strong positive feedback. Customers cited routinely waiting six weeks for answers from legacy analytics vendors, with others expecting even longer lead-times of up to six months for their insights.
How might this look across different use cases and verticals? Below we dig into three scenarios:
- Strategic: An airline asks AI Analyst what their customers are saying about their competitors, and draws on those insights to adjust scheduling and on-board product strategy to maintain differentiation.
- Operational: An insurer asks AI Analyst why resolution on billing conversations is trending down, and discovers that agents are unable to access critical billing systems under some circumstances. Armed with this information, the company prioritizes an IT fix.
- Behavioral: A telco asks AI Analyst why their newest internet tier has sluggish sales, discovering that agents who cite gaming and streaming benefits close sales more than those who pitch productivity and reliability benefits. From there, they can adjust agent coaching to reinforce the more successful selling techniques.
Phil Kolterman, Chief Information Officer at Brinks Home, shares more insight into their experience so far:
“As we have continued to improve & digitize the customer experience, the calls that remain are increasingly complex. It’s almost impossible to get a satisfying answer from agent-captured call drivers and trouble-coding. Even with legacy transcription and analysis, really getting to the nuance required manual review of samples of call transcripts.
I’m thrilled to see natural language insights come online. In one well-structured prompt, the AI can be used to mine for every call that matches the scenario and then analyze those calls for the patterns of behavior that represent the real experience.”
Further Innovations in Cresta Insights
Alongside today’s launch of AI Analyst, we’re also expanding our Insights suite with even more capabilities:
- AI-inferred care outcomes in Outcome Insights: Accurately measure resolution rates and understand customer experience without having to rely on low-response surveys or inconsistent agent notes.
- Enhanced Topic Discovery: Understand the top conversation reasons and FAQs driving customer calls – and how agents are responding to them – at a glance. Overlay outcomes like sales and resolution to quickly spot and troubleshoot problem areas.
- Advanced Behavior Discovery: Identify patterns in agents’ behavior during conversations that are affecting performance.
- All-new Dashboard Builder: Create and share customizable reports and charts to improve tracking and communication across the organization.
From Insights to Action
What does it look like when Cresta unites insights and action? Here’s an example of how it all works together:
Discover a low-resolution topic in Topic Discovery, an intuitive bubble-map view of conversation topics, color-coded according to business outcomes like resolution or sales.
Investigate by asking AI Analyst for common threads from these unresolved conversations, and use Behavior Discovery and Outcome Insights to pinpoint more effective techniques and approaches that agents should be using.
Build AI-powered workflows to orchestrate the right actions at the right moments. Agents receive real-time guidance and coaching to reinforce best practices and ensure consistency.
Track progress with a customized, real-time dashboard in Dashboard Builder.
Cresta’s brand-new AI Analyst and expanded Insights suite are here to eliminate the bottlenecks of manual analytics, so you can focus on what matters most: delivering exceptional customer experiences and driving business results.
Don’t miss your chance to see it in action – register for our upcoming product demo webinar: From Tedious to Transformative: Reimagining Contact Center Insights with AI Analyst.
