Do you know of any cloud-based solutions that can prevent a defective product from (literally) going up in smoke–and help its manufacturer identify such dire situations before they hit the news (and, perhaps, their stock price)?
There’s only one service that I know of that can pull this off: CallMiner’s Eureka. It’s the backbone behind a quiet revolution in customer support, customer service, and improving the customer experience, powered by “listening” to every single call at a client company, incoming and outbound, and converting the words on those calls into structured data.
This allows Eureka to track customer emotion, sentiment, effort, and agent performance to enhance customer experience, employee performance and to mitigate risk.
And, at least once, its power was used to literally prevent homes from erupting in flames. One client of CallMiner is a leading provider of gaming consoles. In an initial read-back of calls taken by customer support, words such as “smoke” and “fire” kept appearing with surprising regularity. The executives in the room for the read-back assumed these were references to plot points in the games themselves. However, a closer read revealed a frantic gamer who had to rush out of his house and into the street when smoke began to pour out of his console. Additional analyses showed that this was far from an isolated incident, but happily, with the help of Eureka, the manufacturer was able to identify the problem quickly and proactively resolve it–before it hit the papers. [Disclosure: I will be speaking at the LISTEN 2019 conference, which is sponsored by CallMiner.]
Eureka by CallMiner
Such dramatic situations are, of course, rare, but the day-to-day impact of Eureka on service improvement can also be very meaningful, in a quieter way, for its customers. Consider how Eureka is utilized at Avadyne Health, a client of CallMiner in the field of patient financial experience.
Avadyne finds that, in spite of all of digital channels open to patients today, nearly 50% of patients who make a payment end up calling into a hospital's call center. The reasoning behind deploying Eureka on these calls is threefold, Avadyne CEO Jayson Yardley tells me. “That high percentage of calls tells us that healthcare consumers have questions or are not receiving the information they desire via self-service methods, and Eureka lets us better understand what those questions and missing information consist of. This can assist us in learning to proactively serve them better in the future, before they need to make the call. It also helps us improve our game when it comes to those actual calls: to identify where we are strong in how we handle a call and where there is room for improvement. Finally, it helps us address the stringent compliance needs of our industry.”
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The “Eureka!” Moment for Eureka
As a customer service consultant, I often get interested in the story behind the story, and I grew curious how Eureka came to be. I was able to learn the answer from Jeff Gallino, CallMiner’s founder and current CTO (he’s also their former CEO). In 2001, Gallino encountered a group of financial analysts who were absolutely overwhelmed with the time and resources needed to pull insights from the 15,000 calls every quarter that they needed to cover. With that kind of volume, he could see that extracting meaningful trends and broader themes from the calls was essentially impossible as a manual task. “This was the eureka moment for me: identifying the value to be found in automating the call review, analysis, and categorization processes.”
Skulking around ‘til he found his first client.
After building a prototype, Gallino snuck into a call center conference in search of a lead customer. During his rogue tour, he overheard a representative from Continental Airlines bemoaning that her entire team had had to spend a week listening to recorded customer service calls to spot every instance of a traveler complaining about baggage fees, in order to understand the impact of a recent fee change. Gallino saw his opportunity: he described his work at CallMiner and convinced Continental to send him 1000 calls on which he could prove his product’s capabilities. The test results, which he presented in person to Continental executives a few weeks later, were well received, and CallMiner was off to the races.
(They weren’t, however, in the pink yet. As this wasn’t a budgeted project for Continental and the technology was largely unproven, Continental was only able to pay the CallMiner team in frequent flyer miles. While perhaps not ideal, this actually ended up being how the nascent company funded its initial sales travel.)
Jump cut to today, and those 1,000 test calls have evolved into a company that now analyzes over 6 million calls every day for over 300 customers, include marquee names like SiriusXM, Dell, ANGI Home Services (HomeAdvisor/Angie’s List), and some of the world’s largest financial services, telecommunications, and business process outsourcer organizations.
And, yes, as far as I’ve been able to confirm, CallMiner’s clients now pay in hard currency.
