Welcome back to the SentiSum Support Insights podcast!

In today's episode we join new podcast host and Community Manager at SentiSum, Bryony Mulkern in a sit down with Co-Founder and CEO, Sharad Khandelwal. 

We discuss the motivations that brought Sharad to develop SentiSum and the different approaches we've seen towards customer support in our own journeys. 

Why manual tagging and monitoring scores isn't enough

An agent’s job, broadly speaking, is to have conversations, empathise with customers and resolve issues. 

It’s a tough job that requires a huge skillset, and often agents are multitasking taking calls, emails, live chats, all while completing their wrap up and admin in minimal time.

The additional responsibility of manually tagging tickets to generate broad-topic reports might give you a rough indicator of volumes, but the absolute gold mine of information that the customer presents in their conversations is being missed.

Perhaps we can see the number of complaints that have come in to the centre, the number of cancellations, some rough indication of technical issues. But what about how the customer is feeling? What specifically about their experience is causing a problem for them? Is there a trend here that needs to be addressed at a department level?

For this level of insights, manual tags just don't cut it.

A lot of companies rely on their trustpilot rating, NPS score, even facebook reviews to get an idea of how their customers are feeling about them, but waiting until your score goes down before you act on an issue means being reactive rather than proactive. Not to mention, now you’re giving yourself two jobs.

1. Rectify the issues that have got your score down
2. Bringing your score back up so that it doesn't affect potential future sales

No-one else sees the conversations that are coming into your centre. The customer doesn't know how many positive or negative interactions you've had that day, all they know is their own experience.

Reviews and ratings are public and can damage your reputation, so once an issue has reached the point of bad reviews, it can mean the difference between a new customer joining you or not.

Analysing your customer conversations in real-time and making proactive decisions around what your customers want and need keeps your score, satisfaction and retention rate higher than if you wait for the fall-out.