Contact centers today have four core missions: to satisfy customers, to sustain or increase revenue, to minimize operating costs, and to provide valuable business insights. Speech analytics contributes to accomplishing all four objectives:
• By understanding customer expectations and the factors that motivate satisfaction.
• By helping identify the key expressions that signal sales opportunities and assessing how well agents transition into selling mode.
• By drilling down into calls that exceeded pre-determined thresholds to identify and rectify causes of sub-par performance.
• By isolating and evaluating interactions that help senior management spot significant competitive actions or determine if costly marketing campaigns are getting the message across as intended.
In practice how you leverage the technology determines how well speech analytics contributes to accomplishing call center objectives.
With Speech Analytics, all calls are reviewed rather than a small sample. Unlike a human monitor, the system reviews all calls, searching for key concepts and phrases you deem of relevance to your business. You can set up your own categorization system to file calls for later retrieval and analysis. Now, all of an agent’s calls are subject to review.
Finding coachable calls is easy – Supervisors can search and retrieve calls based on pre-specified criteria or by using search tools similar to Internet search engines. The result is less time listening to routine calls and more time for coaching.
Greater objectivity in defining soft skills – Supervisors can compare rated calls in calibration sessions to improve consistency. Agents will feel more confident that the evaluation process is fair and objective.
Gather important business intelligence – The contact center can become a valuable source of market and business intelligence. For example, your company is launching a new service and you are kicking it off with an exciting trial offer. By using speech analytics, you simply search for words like “trial offer,” the brand name, and other related words and phrases to assess the frequency of mentions to determine the level of impact.
Understand Why Your Customers are Calling – With the ability to immediately uncover customer insights, contact centers can find the root cause of customer attrition, learn why customers are calling and address their concerns, understand customer motivations, and even analyze calls from high volume periods.
Assure compliance – Say you are in the collections business and your agents are required to state a “mini-Miranda” at the beginning of each collection call. Or your company sells insurance, investments, banking services, wireless services, or virtually any product or service. An alert agent can turn a general service inquiry into a sales opportunity but then certain disclosures need to be stated (and certain words and phrases should never be said). Speech Analytics will automatically check that the correct scripts were read, and even issue alerts to supervisors if they are not stated at an acceptable level of precision.
Speech technology has been around for a couple of decades. Early iterations were problematic. Now speech is truly ready for “prime time” and finding its way into the contact center for self-service and quality assurance. A speech analytics solution can examine a virtually unlimited number of calls – something it would take an Army of supervisors to do. To the contact center this means greater objectivity, accuracy, consistency, and improved agent morale. For your customers it simply means better service.
For more information on the value that speech analytics can bring to your organization, please download a whitepaper by clicking the top of the page.