To help organizations move beyond outdated feedback tools, CallMiner has rolled out Outreach, an AI-based feedback platform. Rather than relying solely on traditional surveys, Outreach combines insights from both unsolicited interactions, such as contact center conversations, and solicited feedback to provide a more comprehensive view of the customer experience (CX).
The tool analyzes specific interaction characteristics to identify actionable insights that support customer engagement and operational improvements across the enterprise.
The March release of Outreach follows CallMiner’s 2024 CX Landscape Report, which highlights challenges with outdated feedback strategies. The report found that 64% of global organizations still rely mainly on solicited feedback. However, the number of companies using a balance of solicited and unsolicited feedback rose to 25% in 2024, up from 20% in 2023.
CallMiner aims to address this shift by enabling CX teams to integrate multiple feedback streams for more proactive and personalized customer engagement.
“Today’s survey vendors are stuck in the past, only thinking about the traditional way to execute surveys,” said Bruce McMahon, chief product officer at CallMiner. “They are not considering whether those surveys are valuable to and personalized for customers, and if responses provide meaningful business insights.”
Outreach Adds Built-In Feedback Execution Tools
The concept behind Outreach is not new. CallMiner has always enabled organizations to combine unsolicited and solicited feedback in a single platform. The innovation comes from the added ability to deliver the native capabilities needed to execute faster, more intelligent feedback campaigns directly within the CallMiner platform.
“CallMiner Outreach is the future of CX. It goes beyond simple surveys and traditional feedback methods by leveraging AI-driven insights from customer interactions to improve the quality, relevance, and efficiency of feedback collection and analysis,” McMahon said.
The platform empowers CX and contact center leaders to personalize Outreach through surveys, quick-response forms, and marketing offers to address and resolve exact customer issues. This capability also strengthens the connection between operational efficiency and customer satisfaction, improving key metrics such as Average Handle Time (AHT) and First Call Resolution (FCR) in contact centers, as well as agent performance and productivity.
The CallMiner platform delivers a more holistic view of the customer. It streamlines feedback loops and improves key engagement metrics.
These include Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures customer loyalty and satisfaction, and CSAT ratings, which gauge satisfaction with products or services and help drive retention and loyalty. Both are critical factors that require timely, accurate monitoring.
By analyzing phone calls, social media, online reviews, emails, and other interactions, CallMiner Outreach ensures relevance, timeliness, and improved customer outcomes. The new tools also provide more effective email and SMS campaigns and closed-loop feedback efforts.
Why Legacy CX Metrics Fall Short Today
CX leaders continue to focus on capturing simple metrics like NPS and CSAT. In theory, these numbers make sense, McMahon offered. They can indicate whether customers will recommend an organization and are happy.
“But in reality, they do not get to the root cause of customer emotions, behaviors, churn, and more,” he told CRM Buyer.
A big reason for this is that traditional survey tools only ask about the contact experience or recommendation without considering the context. Understanding what prompted the customer to contact a business, the content of the interaction, and other considerations is more important.
“Without this context, it is impossible to tailor and personalize customer feedback campaigns that gather meaningful business insights,” he added.
CallMiner Outreach addresses the shortcomings of legacy survey platforms. For example, using the overall CallMiner platform’s deep analytical capabilities, businesses can understand that a customer churned based on product cost considerations. To retain that potentially lost customer, the company could extend a ‘save offer,’ like accepting 30% off their next purchase through the Outreach platform.
“This approach to customer feedback empowers organizations to more effectively resolve frustrations, identify emerging issues, and understand the motivation behind customer actions,” said McMahon.
Proactive CX Tools Help Prevent Churn and Frustration
Shifting from reactive problem-solving to data-driven strategies requires a holistic approach. Outreach identifies key moments in conversations, triggers timely context-aware surveys, and closes the loop with actions.
Outreach enables proactive CX management by identifying trends early and triggering corrective actions before they escalate. McMahon offered an example of an internet or cable service outage.
Without the customer calling in, CallMiner Outreach could trigger a survey to a customer to confirm the restored service. If the customer indicates the outage still exists, a closed-loop team could immediately contact the customer with instructions on resetting the equipment. Following up on restored service, CallMiner Outreach could proactively trigger a communication with a gift card or an account credit for the inconvenience to reinforce trust, loyalty, and satisfaction.
CallMiner believes that the future path to better CX combines unsolicited contact center conversations and solicited feedback via surveys. When you combine all customer feedback data sources, you can better understand your customers. Now, with CallMiner Outreach, organizations can send personalized, context-specific feedback campaigns.
“These are so much more than surveys. They’re surveys, quick response forms, marketing offers, informational communications, and more. We’re breaking down the CX and contact center silos that have long existed at organizations,” said McMahon.
He explained that the platform analyzes phone calls, social media, online reviews, emails, and other customer interactions. It lets CX and contact center leaders replace legacy generic feedback collection methods with dynamic data-driven engagement, ensuring relevance, timeliness, and improved customer outcomes, including more effective campaigns and closed-loop feedback efforts.
Real-Time CX Insights Improve CRM Feedback Loops
CallMiner Outreach identifies emerging issues and triggers timely, targeted feedback campaigns. This capability is powered by the broader analytics foundation of the CallMiner platform.
These insights trigger CallMiner Outreach to execute specific customer feedback communications in real time. The key is collecting feedback from all channels at the right point in the customer journey.
McMahon noted that those responses are then ingested back into the platform and recombined with other customer data points to quickly address unresolved issues and close the feedback loop. This complete view of the customer makes it possible to better predict CX metrics, like NPS and CSAT, instead of waiting for responses via traditional survey mechanisms.
AI Drives Predictive, Personalized CX
AI and automation are central to the CallMiner product suite, not just Outreach. McMahon said the company’s AI analyzes billions of customer interactions to identify patterns and extract relevant insights. This process helps CallMiner determine which interactions warrant further feedback collection and follow-up.
“When you automatically trigger outreach based on specific interaction characteristics versus a general interaction alone, you’re able to capture more valuable responses, reduce survey fatigue, enhance loyalty, and drive meaningful change,” he said.
McMahon predicted that this latest platform addition will shape the next generation of CX solutions. He already sees multiple industries moving toward predictive, hyper-personalized experiences. The common factor is that they are all powered by AI that understands the nuances of customer interactions.
link