By Larry Mark, CTO, SER Solutions, Inc.
For many businesses, the primary interface between the company and its customers is the contact center. As its importance has grown, the contact center has become a crucial component that directly affects a company’s overall success. One negative customer experience can forever jeopardize the relationship between the customer and company.
To ensure that customers receive a high level of service, contact centers typically employ quality assurance managers who monitor a random sampling of calls. However, listening to a random sample is, at best, a balancing act between the desired quality goal and the expense of a large staff of reviewers. To further illustrate the point, consider the following example:
If a contact center randomly monitors 5% of its calls and only 2% of those calls are bad, then most of the calls being monitored are benign, and more importantly, most of the bad calls are not even monitored.
We can conclude from this example that the quality assurance team spends the majority of their time listening to calls that meet quality standards while the calls that most need to be reviewed are missed. Similarly, without a sufficiently large sample of calls, important trends may not be apparent.
Alternatively, contact centers that seek to monitor every call using today’s methods incur significant costs due to the significant number of personnel required to listen to all calls. Even by using a playback feature to listen to calls at double or quadruple speed, quality assurance is extremely time and labor intensive.
The key then to a superior quality assurance program is the ability to review 100% of calls without the associated time requirements and financial costs.
Achieving 100% Quality Assurance
Today, the utilization of speech recognition technology, working in conjunction with call recording systems, eliminates the need for compromise and provides contact centers with the capability to listen to 100% of their calls and analyze every customer interaction.
For example, business rules can be defined to flag all calls in which inappropriate language is used as well as calls in which agents do not properly adhere to the script. By automating call monitoring activities, contact centers can quickly pinpoint quality issues – such as, identifying agents who deviate from the script or do not achieve Key Performance Indicators. Knowing where and what the issues are enable supervisors to take immediate, corrective action.
In addition to pure quality monitoring, these types of systems can also perform high-speed searches on previously archived audio files to mine for information and trends. Historically, stored audio files provided contact centers little value because there was no economically sound way to conduct trend analysis on them. By removing this obstacle and unlocking the valuable information contained in those audio files, trends can not only be identified, but theories can be validated by searching audio for significant words or phrases (e.g., "your product is too expensive", "Company XYZ offers more options", etc.).
Turning Average Agents into Top Performers
The use of speech analytics can significantly reduce contact center operating costs—minimizing the need to manually monitor agent activities and helping to ensure KPIs are being met. Simply put, contact center operators can monitor more calls in less time using fewer resources. Equally important, these systems can help reduce attrition by enabling supervisors to spend more time coaching and developing agent skills. The net result is the ability to turn average agents into top performers that play a key role in increasing customer satisfaction levels; fostering loyal, long-term customers; and boosting recurring revenue.