What is Zacoustic?
Zacoustic is a patented customer experience management system for contact centers. Zacoustic automates the Quality Assurance (QA) and supervisor-agent coaching processes and exposes business improvement opportunities while optimizing customer experience metrics like Net Promoter, Customer Experience and First Call Resolution. Zacoustic features a full reporting suite for individual and group performance and robust business intelligence.
What does Zacoustic do?
Zacoustic increases customer feedback to 100% of calls handled and then leverages a massive data set to expose the highest value QA and coaching. Increasing customer feedback is realized by calibrating agents directly with customers, we call this "Primary Calibration". Agents are required to complete a 2-question yes/no survey on behalf of customers after every interaction, predicting how customers are going to respond. When customers reply, their responses are compared with the agent's. Incongruent responses are the basis for Primary Calibration and with practice, agents are able to respond with total accuracy nearly 100% of the time. Zacoustic eliminates inefficiencies from QA and coaching and automates the entire process. Call center operational personnel are simply focused on correcting defects that will yield the greatest Net Promoter, First Call Resolution and Customer Experience improvements.
Who is Zacoustic for?
Any contact center organization who values customer survey data and an accurate view of both micro and macro customer perception will benefit from Zacoustic. Further, those organizations who strive to align call center agents with customers, and those seeking to make their Quality Assurance and supervisor-agent coaching practice more effective and efficient.
What makes Zacoustic different?
The patented process of calibrating agents directly with customers is what differentiates Zacoustic from other customer experience management tools presently in the market. Agent-customer calibration is defined by the agent’s ability to accurately predict how the customer is going respond to your survey thus creating two unique competitive advantages which are protected by our patents:
1. Naturally grooms agents to acutely detect distress and take favorable action proactively intra-call
2. Converts traditionally low customer survey responses into 100% allowing the Zacoustic to search for the highest value calls to present to QA
Zacoustic removes randomness and inefficency from QA and coaching and enhances your current operational practices.
How does Zacoustic improve Net Promoter / Customer Experience and First Call Resolution?
Zacoustic focuses your entire organization on evaluating and coaching agents on the call types that will have the greatest impact to NPS, CX and FCR. With Zacoustic, every call handled has customer feedback associated with it, enabling Zacoustic algorithms to generate the highest value QA and coaching. Zacoustic is to QA and coaching what Google is to the finding high value information on the internet.
How does Zacoustic impact Average Handle Time (AHT)?
The AHT impact related to agents replying to the Zacoustic agent survey is nil. The agent survey is usually limited to two yes/no questions (satisfaction or NPS, and resolution) and agents respond as they are closing the call with the customer thus creating no impact to AHT. Moreover, since the coaching sessions are almost 100% related to calls that the agent cannot satisfy and/or resolve, the AHT improvements post-coaching can be material. Agents know where to find answers and they tend to move through calls with more confidence post Zacoustic-based coaching sessions thus lowering overall AHT.
Is Zacoustic PCI compliant?
Yes - No customer data is transmitted to Zacoustic. Contact us for more details.
How does Zacoustic increase customer survey responses to 100%?
Agents are required to complete a 2-question yes/no survey on behalf of customers after every interaction, predicting how customers are going to respond. When customers reply, their responses are compared with the agent's. Incongruent responses are the basis for calibration and with practice, employees are able to respond with total accuracy nearly 100% of the time. Agents serve as customer proxies with high accuracy and the result is a virtual 100% customer survey response rate.
How will Zacoustic impact my culture?
Zacoustic is inclusive of agents, allowing them to advocate on behalf of the customer while prioritizing QA and coaching activities within a “self-service” model. This culminates in enthusiastic adoption as agents embrace it as a non-punitive and helpful tool. Zacoustic naturally requires that agents, QA and supervisors work together within a fair, logical and simple process of constant customer experience improvement.
Can I test drive Zacoustic?
Yes. Contact us and we will conduct a simulation within your environment using real data to demonstrate how Zacoustic exposes the highest value calls to QA and coaching while projecting the improvement to Net Promoter, First Call Resolution and Customer Experience you can anticipate. Once convinced that Zacoustic can enhance your existing QA and coaching practice, a formal pilot or implementation can commence.
What is the Match Percentage?
The Match Percentage is a measurement used to evaluate the agent’s ability to accurately infer customer perceptions. When the agent and customer survey responses are incongruent, it becomes a valuable learning experience helping agents hone their abilities related to understanding customer perception.
The Match Percentage is defined as the percentage of agent and customer survey responses that match.
Customers won’t respond to 100% of the Customer Surveys, so the Match Percentage is applied to all of the Agent Survey responses, which corrects the entire data set. When confident that agents are aligned with customer perception as demonstrated through a high Match Percentage, the following benefits are realized:
- The agent has a demonstrable command of customer perception
- With the agent firmly understanding customer perception, empathy can be properly applied, and subtleties are less likely to be missed
- Coaching related to improvement of metrics becomes easier because agents are more cognizant of customer perception
How does Zacoustic make Quality Assurance more efficient?
Most call centers employ a QA team responsible for listening to recordings of agent-customer interactions while preparing evaluations related to call handling. Traditionally, QA reps are required to randomly search for calls from within the total pool of call recordings. Since call centers on average resolve about 60% of calls, and another 10-20% are rooted in agent non-controllable concerns, the likelihood of exposing high value learning opportunities is less than 30%. Therefore, the overall process of QA evaluations and agent coaching is inherently passive and ineffective.
Zacoustic removes passiveness and randomness and replaces it with a logical systematic process. Zacoustic’s patented algorithms present the most opportunistic calls to QA for evaluation and agent coaching, as opposed to the random fishing that makes most QA processes inefficient. The QA process is sped up by more than 20% as the call search process is automated with the algorithm constantly presenting the highest value calls for evaluation.
How does Zacoustic make supervisors more efficient?
Related to supervisor-agent coaching, within traditional call center environments supervisors must complete a number of disparate tasks to coach an agent, including searching for call recordings, printing QA evaluations and documenting coaching take-away. Zacoustic 2.0 brings all of these tasks together within one tool which allows supervisors to deliver higher impact coaching in less time.
How do low customer survey response rates make my operation less effective?
Less than one in ten customers responds to customer surveys. While this makes for statistically accurate macro data, at the call center operations level these responses are highly random and difficult to action. A customer complaint may be tied to a call type that the call center agent might handle one or two of a month but regardless, most company policies dictate that every negative customer survey response must be actioned. Problematic higher volume call types are often ignored in favor of fulfillment of this policy and because these calls are impossible to expose with consistency thus creating a compounded negative impact to both cost and quality.
For example, a cable customer complains about problems with “on demand movies”, a call type the agent handles 2-3 of per month, or less than 1% of calls handled. Following the call, the customer responds negatively to the customer survey. The survey arrives at the call center and QA spends 20 minutes searching for and listening to the call recording, and preparing an evaluation. Later, the supervisor coaches the agent absorbing another 20 minutes. However, the yield on this exercise will have very little impact on the agent’s overall ability to improve his or her customer experience metrics due to the low volume of “on demand movie” calls. Meanwhile, the agent struggles with the “resetting customer passwords” call type, of which the agent handles 2-3 calls of a day, or more than 20% of calls handled. However, due to the random nature of survey responses, a negative customer survey for this agent never arrives, or it takes weeks or months to arrive. In the meantime, the agent is driving a negative customer experience 2-3 times per day due to the struggle with “resetting customer passwords”. Multiply this across a cable company’s agent footprint of tens of thousands of agents and it’s easy to understand how inaccurate traditional random monitoring is, and how this inefficiency is crippling the organizational ability to change customer perceptions.
What does Zacoustic automate?
Zacoustic is designed to enhance your current processes, not replace them.
Specifically:
1. Agent surveys - the Zacoustic agent survey is customized for your environment and built to mirror the Customer Satisfaction, NPS and Resolution questions currently being generated by your company to your customers. It's important to keep the fundamental of Zacoustic in mind - increasing customer survey responses to 100% by making your agents reliable customer proxies. (note: if you currently do not have a customer survey process, the Zacoustic team can help guide you)
2. Customer surveys - customer responses from your current survey process are sent to Zacoustic via API and compared to the agent's response for the same call. No customer data is transmitted to Zacoustic; only the customer's phone number and time of call. The customer's name, account numbers, credit card information, etc. is NOT sent to Zacoustic.
3. Quality Assurance (QA) - Your QA form is fully integrated into Zacoustic. The QA reps experience is as follows
a. "Next Evaluation" button initaties search for the highest value call using Zacoustic's patented algorithm
b. Your native QA form pops up
c. The link to the associated call recording is attached to the form
d. The QA rep listens to the call and populates the evaluation
e. "Submit" button auto-generates coaching and sends to the agent's supervisor (all within Zacoustic!)
The most salient point related to QA is: Zacoustic is enhancing your current process by sending the highest value calls through your existing QA form. The need for QA to fish for high value calls is replaced by the Zacoustic algorithm improving QA efficiency by more than 20%.
4. Coaching - Supervisors receive notification on their Zacoustic desktop or iPad. Embedded is your native QA form and coaching methodology, as well as a link to the call recording.
5. Coaching Validation - Zacoustic monitors agent performance post-coaching and notifies the appropriate chain of command if improvements are not immediately observed.
Can you explain what makes a customer calibration system valuable and the benefits of agents being able to predict customer survey responses?
Together, the world’s most respected brands are spending billions to improve the experience for their customers. For good reason - in this age of social media and the 24-hour news cycle the stakes have never been higher.
Customer surveys are the purest measure of customer experience, but on average only 10-15% of customers respond. Of those that respond, approximately 25% are dissatisfied yielding even fewer surveys that can be used for agent-learning purposes. Therefore, coaching and big data insights stemming from this low survey response rate are vague and often inaccurate. Reduced to a problem statement; Call centers lack sufficient data to drive process, product and behavioral changes to achieve their strategic customer experience goals.
Zacoustic enables agents to accurately predict customer survey responses, which generates the data and analytics necessary to transform the customer experience. Following every interaction, agents must predict how customers are going to respond to existing survey questions. Actual customer responses calibrate agents and improve their predictive accuracy. Once calibrated, agents produce a virtual 100% customer survey response rate. Calibrated agent survey predictions includes highly accurate customer experience, issue resolution, repeat contact, disposition, and AHT for every interaction handled, a groundbreaking first in the contact center industry. Zacoustic presents users with unprecedented big data insight opportunities allowing for targeted actions, which are most likely to optimize the customer experience.
What is “Match Percentage” and why is it helpful in determining the agent’s ability to infer customer preferences?
The percentage of agent predictions which match actual customer survey responses comprises the Match Percentage. For example, if the agent predicts that the customer is dissatisfied and the customer responds with the same answer, that’s a match.
Think of the customer as the “auditor” to the agent’s “predictor”. Zacoustic compares the actual customer survey response with the agent prediction and through this iterative process agents achieve calibration.
We believe that the Match Percentage is the most accurate measure of the agent’s ability to understand their customers. Calibrated agents are more present in their conversations with the customer and further, calibrated agents are more likely to take actions toward proactively improving the customer experience when they sense the interaction is getting off track.
How do the insights your solution provides improve such metrics as AHT FCR to build NPS and enhance the customer experience as a whole?
Insights gleaned through Zacoustic data improve knowledge bases, training and coaching sessions, and processes to rout out repeat calls and lower AHT (See 13% annual cost savings from the Premier Streaming Service Case attached). Additionally, Zacoustic data is leveraged to derandomize the QA selection process to streamline finding valuable calls, reducing time and headcount needed to do so.
Zacoustic operationalizes and increases NPS by providing customer experience, issue resolution, repeat contact, disposition, and AHT metrics for every customer interaction. This complexity of data makes it incredibly quick and easy to isolate the agents that are demonstrating best practice, while exposing those who are driving the greatest negative impact. Zacoustic allows operations to focus exclusively on those actions that are going to have the most favorable impact to the metrics.
What differentiates Zacoustic from other offerings in the marketplace?
Zacoustic calibrates agents with customers so that they recognize when they need to change to better satisfy customers and resolve their issues. Voice analytics and other contact center tools don’t yield this critical benefit.
Further, Zacoustic bifurcates every customer interaction from the customer’s point of view of resolution and satisfaction. Voice analytics and other data mining techniques allow users to find individual and potentially problematics calls, but the data that comes from customer-calibrated agents creates a virtual 100% customer survey response rate which, due to our global patent protection, cannot be replicated by other offerings in the marketplace.