Companies with contact centers and multilocation businesses have traditionally focused on providing the highest customer service at the lowest cost. But the objectives of these customer service teams have changed as companies realize the potential revenue opportunity that exists in each customer interaction. According to Forrester’s Networks And Telecom Survey, 2023, increasing revenue is most frequently selected as a top contact center objective. Real-time revenue execution (RTRE) platform vendors have built important features that enable companies to improve revenue outcomes. After evaluating the top vendors in this category, five features stood out:

  • Digital marketing investment optimization. This feature enables marketing teams to measure intent, outcome, and revenue from conversations driven by their digital and offline marketing. Optimizations include automating real-time bidding and allocation to the channels, tactics, ad creative, and keywords to drive the highest return on ad spend. Users can create targeted audiences for digital next steps, like retargeting high-intent leads that didn’t convert on the call or suppressing ads to existing customers who called for support or callers who were already converted.
  • Improving sales by correlating seller actions to results. This feature analyzes sales conversation data to detect behaviors (not just keywords) and correlates those behaviors to sales outcomes. Generated insights predict the impact of increasing behavior adherence and display the predicted impact in terms of KPI value so that sales leaders know which behaviors to reinforce among their sellers. This same behavioral analysis applies to individual sellers, allowing coaches to create tailored coaching plans for each agent to improve specific areas of weakness. Conversations are autoscored and used to build seller coaching plans.
  • Improving seller performance in real time. This feature empowers sellers to dynamically adjust their approach during conversations, creating personalized interactions that drive positive sales results. Sentiment correlates with what is happening throughout the conversation to influence the guidance that sellers receive. Refined in-call script guidance capabilities allow the platform to prompt sales reps with script snippets and chat responses to increase conversion rates and reduce onboarding time.
  • Automation of data entry. This feature makes it easy to leverage data produced to lessen the administrative activities of sellers. Triggers can both access and present data to sellers based on the conversation, customer details, and conversational input to reduce effort during calls. Additional triggers will fill out forms for the seller, updating their systems of record and reducing the administrative work required.
  • Leveraging sentiment to drive results. This feature provides visibility to sentiment, allowing customers to see/adjust language, applying differing weights and thresholds and layering emotion content to other categorical components (i.e., certain emotions in relation to identified topics such as products or desired behaviors). The system separates language-based emotion and sentiment with tone-based ones and combines them to drive action by relating emotion to a specific category (e.g., emotional response to a promotion or product). Sentiment becomes a topic used to drive action in real time by alerting the agent, presenting offers, and presenting notifications for closed-loop actions.

While these five features stood out, focus on improving revenue outcomes was the biggest value seen in RTRE platforms. Since these vendors are focusing most of their efforts on the revenue use case, the quality of their capabilities goes far beyond the features found in a contact-center-as-a-service or CRM platform. To learn more about these vendors, read The Forrester Wave™: Real-Time Revenue Execution Platforms, Q2 2024 (Forrester subscription required).