Today’s contact centre plays a critical role in communicating a company’s brand to its customers. Therefore, it becomes vital to ensure that the customer experience is consistently maintained and that you are addressing all of the customer’s needs. The challenge is how do you adequately collect customer requirements and provide a consistent customer experience? You need to leverage speech analytics.

Despite its use by financial institutions and other large businesses for many years now, many organizations still view speech analytics as an out of reach technology. The truth is, in the last few years’ speech analytics has become readily available as part of many existing product suites and as a 3rd party add-ons.

If you’ve not looked into the powerful capabilities and benefits of the product, it is well worth investigating. Here are just some of reasons why you might want to use it:

Reason #1: Big Data

Traditionally, most data collected about a client through the call centre consisted of client wait times, average handle time and agent wrap up codes. Information about the call was either not captured or was stored as a wav file on a server. The only way to access the data was to play back each recording. Given that a typical organization may have hundreds of thousands of calls per year, it was impractical to access the data available in the call recordings.

Enter speech analytics. By recording every single call and translating all of the data into text, the information that was previously inaccessible can now be included as a subset of data in your overall datamart. The result is that the information contained in these recordings can now be included in a business intelligence analysis.

Reason #2: True Agent Performance

A big challenge that most contact centres have is an inability to effectively review and evaluate agent performance. A typical contact centre may only evaluate an agent six times per month. When an agent can answer 1500-3000 calls per month, a typical call centre only samples 0.2%-0.4% of an agent’s calls. The likelihood of identifying issues or uncovering behavioural patterns is like finding a needle in a haystack.

But, when speech analytics are used, 100% of the calls in the centre can be monitored and evaluated for basic conditions. Every call can be evaluated, categorized, linked with call outcomes, and a quality assurance (QA) score can be completed using criteria based on specific wording used by agents and callers.

Using speech analytic tools, supervisors looking for calls to evaluate can identify high value calls like those that have potential sales associated with them, simply by searching on key meta-data.

What’s more, compliance related elements can be enforced on every call. If agents are required to read a disclaimer and get consent from the caller, the system can be programmed to verify that the agent spoke the disclaimer and the caller accepted the terms.

The system could then track key positive words being used during the conversation such as the agent using upsell opportunities. Also, it can track negative words linked to customer frustration and identify when a caller asks for a supervisor. The resulting data can be used to score the agents performance and the overall outcome of the call.

Other identifiable attributes include long periods of silence, instances of callers and agent talking over each other, and some platforms can even register the ‘emotions’ of the caller and agent. These attributes, in combination with key phrases and words can be used to generate real-time triggers for supervisors when the caller or agent becomes upset.

Reason #3: Identify Trends

Another powerful benefit of speech analytic tools is to understand why calls are occurring. Traditionally, supervisors would only have access to inbound queue volumes, but not have any real insight into the nature of the calls.

For example, the department may be receiving calls about a promotion that was accidentally released early. Traditionally, these trends would only be identified by agents entering disposition codes or by notifying the supervisors, or by supervisors directly observing agents.

However, using a speech analytics tool, each call is analyzed and common words and phrases are trended – real-time on the supervisor’s desktop. Seeing a specific trend, supervisors can proactively address the issue in a way that improves the customer experience. In this example, a possible solution could be to provide additional scripting to alert callers about the issue.

The benefits of mining the data go beyond the supervisor reacting to service-affecting trends. The data captured and converted from every conversation in the contact centre can be shared with and leveraged by other departments for increased customer insight.

An engineering department could monitor complaints regarding products. Sales could analyze calls where callers ask for a new product or the number of times a competitor is referenced. Marketing could analyze calls to determine what words and phrases are being used by the callers for their campaigns. Since the contact centre is often the focal point of customer communication, the metrics available to the business through speech analytics are immense and valuable.

Reason #4: Increase Productivity

With a typical QA program, identifying trends in performance can be extremely time consuming and areas of improvement can easily be overlooked. By having access to the data from every call made, by every agent, supervisors and QA staff can perform root cause analysis on calls to identify actual trends in call performance.

For example, agents may be dealing with simple repetitive questions that could be better addressed with additional self-serve options in the interactive voice response (IVR). Without a clear understanding of the situation and the volume of calls that are impacted, it is difficult to determine if a change would be beneficial.

Final thoughts

In today’s competitive marketplace it’s vital that organizations gain a better understanding of their client’s needs and drive the customer experience by using all of the data that is available. Speech analytics, while in the past may have been unattainable, is now readily available and within reach for most contact centres. This technology will help your operations teams hone their staff into highly efficient and effective agents, and unlock a wealth of data for management teams throughout the organization.