The challenge

A global social media platform receives the bulk of its revenue from advertising. The last quarter of the year leading up to the Christmas holiday is a key period for the company and in this most recent holiday season it ran a marketing campaign to encourage advertisers to increase their spend at this time.

While sales associates and account managers were instructed to mention specific holiday period pricing and offers to its advertisers, there was no way to verify how many actually complied. The company needed a way to determine if customer service agents promoted the relevant products and if the promotion led to increased sales.

Manually listening to calls in their entirety wasn’t a cost-effective strategy, as only a small sample, perhaps 1% or 2% of the volume, could be monitored in this way. The client turned to TTEC to provide a data-driven solution instead.

Our solution

As a long-term partner, TTEC already had a strong relationship with the company. TTEC associates manage outreach to inactive advertisers — customers who had not placed advertising within the previous 28 days. Success in re-engaging advertisers evolved to include contacting at-risk and growing customers to recommend new products and make additional sales of advertising opportunities. So it was a natural choice to assist the brand with its holiday season promotion and analysis.

TTEC deployed its proven speech analytics solution, which combines call recording technology with artificial intelligence (AI) and analysis to gather unique insights. The solution converted recordings to phonetic text files, which were then queried to obtain insights into conversations to help the company improve associate efficiency and improve sales conversions.

Queries were run against the files for all associates at the TTEC facility. Approximately 200 calls of 20+ minutes each were selected for analysis. Specific terms relating to holiday pricing and offers were used to identify calls in which these products were mentioned. The findings were presented to the center manager.

Armed with this information, the client re-energized its campaign to associates with clear instructions on how to discuss holiday pricing and emphasizing the need for compliance.

The results

Following these actions, the company saw significant improvements. Compliance jumped from about 20% to 60%, an impressive result considering some advertisers’ products were not related to holiday season items in December, such as landscape services. Other key results included:

• 214% increase in associates mentioning specific holiday pricing topics
• 233% lift in customers taking action based on associate recommendations
• 118% increase in total spend on the accounts managed by TTEC

By using cutting-edge speech analytics and leveraging its sales operations expertise, TTEC closely monitored associate compliance to increase adherence to strategy, and significantly increased client revenue at a critical time of year.