Tethr Launches Essentials and Customer Effort Index

Tethr, a provider of artificial intelligence-powered conversational intelligence platforms, has launched Tethr Essentials, which helps organizations discover business-impacting insights from their customer conversations.

Tethr Essentials provides insights from all customer interactions, not just those from satisfied or frustrated customers, and detailed context behind entire customer conversations, helping companies understand what happened during interactions and why.

"Companies have been looking for an alternative to surveys for a long time," said Matt Dixon, Tethr' chief product and research officer, in a statement. "Unfortunately, while AI-powered speech analytics always held tremendous promise as a new technology that could help companies to listen at scale, the technology has been too difficult to deploy and too expensive to resource to really be a viable alternative to surveys. In this respect, Tethr Essentials is an absolute game-changer: as easy to deploy as a survey and with none of the downside and cost historically associated with speech analytics."

Tethr Essentials is based on the Tethr Effort Index, a new scoring index that tracks customer effort on every customer interaction, that Tethr just released as well.

Tethr Essentials leverages this platform and expands on it, combining additional sources of customer effort insight beyond what was captured in the original research or that can be found through surveys.

Tethr Essentials includes the following:

• More than 100 research-backed categories representing thousands of validated phrases and utterances associated with a multitude of ways that customers experience friction;
• Automatic detection of sources of customer effort, loyalty indicators such as churn, and perceptions of the commercial experience with the company's reps and brands;
• On-demand searchable voice-of-the-customer with a full transcript and archive of all customer conversations;
• The Tethr Effort Index (TEI), and
• Optional Tethr Builder licenses, enabling users to build new categories and further train Tethr's AI engine.

Tethr Essentials plugs into call recording and chat infrastructures with Tethr's packaged integrations to many popular telephony and recording systems. It collects conversational data from networked, cloud, or on-premises environments.

The Tethr Effort Index, meanwhile, will soon be incorporated into the Tethr platform, enabling companies to track customer effort at a conversation-level in real time, immediately drilling down into high-effort interactions that are likely to create disloyalty and churn. TheTEI score is automatically assigned at the completion of every customer interaction.

"When my team at CEB (now Gartner) invented the Customer Effort Score 10 years ago, we felt it provided a great way for companies to identify those high-effort interactions that lead to disloyalty and churn," Dixon explained. "Unfortunately, the CES is a survey question, which means that it suffers from low--and, for most companies, declining--response rates, weak customer verbatim, and well-known flaws like extreme response and recall biases. The Tethr Effort Index solves for all of these issues--massive sample size, no bias, and incredibly rich customer verbatim--by applying AI and machine learning to assessing and measuring effort levels in a customer interaction. This is the cold fusion of customer experience measurement."

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