Using sentiment analysis to drive customer satisfaction at Toyota Finance New Zealand

In 2021, Toyota Finance New Zealand rolled out a new contact center system to provide deeper and clearer insights on customer behavior, sentiment and other key indicators.

The results were impressive with the project delivering measurable gains in customer retention, a significant drop in first contact resolution rates and the ability to quickly pivot to meet new customer trends.

Laurette Lane, credit operations manager for Toyota Finance New Zealand, is sharing more details during All Access: The AI revolution APAC. In this interview, she gives CX Network a preview of the session and explains why live sentiment monitoring has been game changing for the business.

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CX Network: During your fireside chat at All Access: The AI revolution APAC, you talk about the sentiment analytics capabilities that were introduced as part of the new contact center suite at Toyota Finance New Zealand. Give us a preview of what happened and the results that were recorded.

Laurette Lane: We have analytics tone sentiment monitoring built into our contact center system, which automatically pulls the data that comes in from all our customer interactions across the business. The sentiment analysis runs in the background to pull the data daily, giving us truly data-rich results.

At a high level, our sentiment analysis capabilities are about understanding what our customers are talking about and moving away from an anecdotal understanding to work with real information. My team and I have been creating analytics queries based on key things that are happening in the market. For example, the cost of living is a big issue, and we can look for terms such as ‘expense’, or other key phrases that can be used to build an analytical query and assess customer sentiment on that topic.

From those queries we can also then establish both the customer’s and agent’s sentiment during the interaction, whether it is neutral or extremely positive or negative. Those results do not necessarily indicate that a customer is happy or angry; it could be about the conversation they are having, it could be a sensitive topic that generates negative sentiment. But that information gives us the ability to act quicker without waiting for survey results, external market research data or relying on what our people are telling us.

It gives us real data and real facts on a broader base of customers, and because we have data, we are able to action the insights and pivot a lot quicker.

Literally, I could run a query now and see everything that my team was doing up to the close of business yesterday. Live sentiment monitoring has been a game changer.

CX Network: Your session is called Implementing sentiment monitoring to improve customer retention. What impact did this contact center upgrade have on customer retention and loyalty?

Laurette Lane: We are monitoring a couple of key things in finance, and one is customer retention. We are seeing higher retention rates, where there are fewer customers settling a loan early and customers are coming back to us for their next vehicle and loan, which means we have created an ongoing relationship. The rates of that retention have increased significantly. Retention is one of our biggest concerns in a highly competitive market.

Another area we look at, in terms of customer satisfaction, is our first contact resolution (FCR). When we first started using sentiment monitoring our FCR was around eight percent and that highlighted a few opportunities for improvement. One was that agents didn’t always have the knowledge or tools to be able to answer customers immediately, or we were relying on others in the business, transferring customers to other departments, which can cause frustration for the customer. Now, our average first contact resolution is more than 90 percent.

That had a knock-on effect because we can now talk to more customers and answer their calls faster, which means that 80 percent of our calls are now answered within 30 seconds of the customer ringing.

Looking at the sentiment overall, the amount of positive sentiment that we have versus negative, as well as FCR, are the live indicators that we use for customer satisfaction now.

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CX Network: How important are AI-powered tools such as the sentiment analysis when it comes to delivering experiences that foster stronger customer loyalty?

Laurette Lane: AI tools are critical to customer loyalty because we are able to see more than we have ever been able to see, as well as gaining a deeper understanding of our customers.

Before it was all a very high-level understanding and, the biggest thing for me, it was delayed. You did not know how a customer felt until potentially months down the track when surveys were completed, information was gathered or worse, a customer complaint was made because something had gone terribly wrong. Now, with sentiment analysis, we can keep on track of things literally on a daily basis, and then quickly pivot if anything is going wrong.

AI is critical going forward and as it gets more powerful, I believe it is going to really empower our contact centers and enable our agents to have access to information that they otherwise would not have or be able to respond to.

We will be able to deliver better service, and all of those things contribute to customer loyalty.

It’s the old adage; it is easier for us to retain our existing customers and build that relationship with them than it is to find new customers.

CX Network: Without a doubt, the next big thing in the contact center is generative AI. Looking ahead, what are some of the changes that you expect generative AI to bring to the contact center?

Laurette Lane: There is a lot of nervousness around generative AI across a number of industries, but I look at it a little differently.

It is going to empower our contact centers because our agents are going to have greater access to information to better serve customers without necessarily having to have that in-depth knowledge or experience. You are able to have people with more generalist skill sets rather than specialist skill sets.

AI can actually then free our agents to have more meaningful conversations because it can deal with some of that basic stuff where it is just addressing queries. Because this is such a leap in capabilities from the old chatbots, it is going to deliver a better self-service experience.

I also think, as we dig deeper, generative AI is going to be able to help us better predict customers' needs and trends, providing better, faster customer experience, and more consistent answers.

We are looking at a generative AI knowledge base that our teams can use as well as feeding into chat functionality. That would be another massive game changer, because I could have people across the business, who all have the relevant information to hand, and route calls to them, rather than having to spend a lot of time and money on training.

CX Network: Having successfully upgraded your contact center with new AI capabilities, what are your top tips for CX practitioners who are looking for an AI vendor to work with?

Laurette Lane: I think this is probably an overarching tip, but definitely do your research.

If you just rely on a sales pitch, everyone sounds amazing, but you do not know if they'll actually deliver on it. That was a key thing for us when we were looking at our contact center provider.

You also need a vendor that is constantly evolving, that is current, because this technology is not something you are able to just set and forget. The quick evolution means you need a solution provider that can keep up with the pace.

The last point, but probably the biggest, is you need to know where and how your customer and company data is stored and how it will be secured. This is huge in finance but it’s important for anybody that holds customer data. Every organization has a huge amount of sensitive customer information and probably one of the biggest fears about AI is how open to the world we are making all of our personal sensitive information.

Catch Laurette at All Access: The AI revolution APAC, March 19-20, 2024.