I'm calling customer support to complain about fraudulent charges to my health insurance. Some joker has rung up multiple doctor visits to clinics in Miami, Florida -- a place I've never even wanted to visit.
At least, that's according to the prearranged script. In reality, I've been invited to get a first hand dose of eLoyalty (ELOY), a behavioral-analytics and customer-relations outfit that promises -- among other things -- to boost call-center productivity and speed customers painlessly through what many might count as their most exasperating minutes on earth.
The company touts its NASA tech and endless possibilities for making customers happy -- so much so that I had to try it out myself.
Trained to pick up on verbal clues that indicate different personality types, my service rep, Lila, catches that I'm not serene like a "Yoda" or emotionally focused like an "Oprah" -- two of six basic profiles in eLoyalty's arsenal. Rather, she figures out that I'm belief-focused, with a strong helping of matter-of-factness, and helps me through the rest of call with no nonsense and no profuse apologies.
Not bad.
You've probably never heard of eLoyalty, but they've almost certainly heard you -- and quickly pegged your personality by analyzing nothing more than your voice over the phone, parsing your words, pauses and even inflections on the spot.
The company works with call centers that handle the nation's biggest car-insurance firms, banks and health care organizations. They're usually the ears listening in after the automated message promises you, "This call is being recorded for quality assurance."
It is no giant. Founded in 1990, the company is mostly privately held, and lost $2.7 million in the third quarter of 2010 on revenues of $23.3 million, according to SEC filings.
ELoyalty's premise is that training customer-service representatives, or CSRs, to quickly diagnose which of the six types of personalities a caller is leads to happier customers and shorter calls. And shorter calls matter, because when it comes to customer service, time is money -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 to $1.50 per minute, depending on how you account for it.
And it promises even more. ELoyalty says that its system can help companies know the core personality type of each of their customers, so they can individually tailor websites and e-mails to each one. Taken to its logical conclusions, it could promise a new model of customer targeting that's far less invasive that web tracking -- if it actually works.
While we all like to think we are complex beings who defy understanding by a mere algorithm, that's not actually the case, according to eLoyalty's Melissa Moore, the company's vice president for behavioral analytics.
"When we go into distress, we revert to our core way and go into very familiar patterns," Moore said.
The company cites a high-tech pedigree, applying a voice-data model first developed at NASA as part of the shuttle program to determine who would be the most compatible types of astronauts for a mission. When the astronauts were on a flight, NASA used the same technology to monitor the astronauts' communication with Mission Control for signs of distress, the company claims.
The company also relies on data -- lots of it.
Every single call to an eLoyalty client — exasperated to routine — gets recorded. Every few hours a batch of recorded audio is uploaded to eLoyalty's data center in Minneapolis where algorithms parse the calls, looking for anomalies and customers "going red," industry parlance for a customer getting irate.
It now claims a database of more than 500 million recorded phone calls and a team of 150 behavioral scientists, linguists and statisticians who test new correlations.
"We can analyze 10,000 of a call center employee's calls," said eLoyalty vice president Jason Wesbecher. "We can say out of those 10,000, we identified distress on 600, and of those 400 were 'emotions,' so we need to work with how to train that person for working with emotions-based callers."
ELoyalty exclusively licensed the NASA technology, which, in turn, is based on the personality typing theories of psychologist and author Taibi Kahler. (Some might remember Kahler as the personality guru used by Bill Clinton in his 1992 election campaign to connect better with voters.)
Kahler's methodology divides people into six main personality types:
- Spock: Thoughts-based person who approaches every issue rationally with a "just the facts, ma'am" mentality.
- __Princess Diana: __Emotions-based person who wants warmth and congeniality.
- __Rush Limbaugh: __Opinions-based person, a person for whom strongly held beliefs often trump facts.
- __Robin Williams: __Reactions-based person who immediately likes or dislikes something and enjoys playing.
- __Donald Trump: __Actions-based person, a person who prefers doing to talking.
- __Yoda: __Reflections-based person, someone who likes to think matters through.
While each of us contains a bit of each, the company says, we all have dominant parts.
The differences aren't hard to learn to distinguish. For instance, an emotions-based person might ask for the representative's name because they want to make a connection. On the other hand, a thoughts-based person will ask for a name and badge number so they have a record in case they need to call back or to threaten a lawsuit.
Similarly, profuse apologies matter to some personality types — and the apology needs to come early and earnestly, while other types don't care if the company is sorry, they just want an overcharge taken care of.
But, when opinions-based people call in, they are more more formal at the beginning of the call and they are going to lay out why they are calling, and they will be looking more for an explanation of why something happened rather than waiting for an apology.
"They will call to point out the flaw, and they they will want the background on why it happened, e.g., 'That's because of this and this'," Moore said. "Then they will suggest that 'Maybe in the future you might want to send a communication when a policy changes', and tell you the way you should do business."
By contrast, emotions-based people want to connect to the person they are calling, and will try to joke with or ask personal questions of the CSR.
"For them, 'Hello, how are you?' isn't an empty question -- they want to know," Moore said. "To a thoughts-based person, it is not a data point."
If eLoyalty figures out that a particular customer service representative is having problems, they can then train that CSR to handle certain types of callers better.
For example, eLoyalty's algorithm might notice a call that is abnormally long and filled with heated language. The company's software would flag the call, so that a supervisor can review it and develop a plan for contacting the customer. That's key, eLoyalty says, for companies to make sure to deal with calls where a customer is threatening to sue or to call a congressman.
ELoyalty also helps call center representatives develop a vocabulary to talk about callers -- particularly after the CSRs take an assessment test that gives them a breakdown of their own personality.
Customers using eLoyalty interviewed by Wired.com gave the program high marks, although they did not volunteer to share hard data showing returns on investment.
"Everyone really loved the product," said James Gordon, vice president of health solutions for Vangent -- the leading call-center company for the federal government. "You hear a lot of conversations like, 'I had a thoughts-based person today who ...'"
"If you recognize someone is emotions-based, just by being sympathetic, you are being open to call control," Gordon said. "Right now the caller is taking control of the call, and you are not going to get the info you need, to help them complete the transaction."
Progressive Insurance also turned to eLoyalty when it started running commercials featuring a spirited customer service agent named "Flo" who tailored her pitch to all sorts of customers.
ELoyalty says the company wanted to make sure that each of their 4,000 CSRs had that same ability.
Training CSR's is just the beginning of what personality typing can do, according to eLoyalty's Wesbecher.
"We can feed the profile in the customer's data warehouse, so they can tailor the website and outbound marketing communication to that person's style," Wesbecher said. "So when a thoughts-based person logs onto Bank of America, we know he prefers a highly organized, very clean site like Google."
"Whereas" he continues, "when an emotions-based person logs in, she loves it if the first thing she sees is a picture of a family on a patio with a dog."
Photo: Helen King/Corbis
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