If you own, manage or work in a contact center, your workplace can greatly benefit from the incorporation of speech analytics technology. Speech analytics empowers your company to use customer voice data recorded throughout phone calls to gain an in-depth understanding of customers' experiences. With this data at your disposal, you will develop a thorough comprehension of what your customers desire and the manner in which they interact with your staff.
A Burgeoning Industry Trend
When it comes to contact center technology, speech analytics is trending upward and quickly, spilling over into the mainstream. These tools enable organizations to accumulate a wealth of data gleaned from customer discussions and gain unique insights. Every business can stand to learn more about its customer base. The problem typically lies in finding a way to obtain helpful information about what customers desire, and how they interact with company representatives. Speech analytics technology generates this critical information on a silver platter. This technology represents the competitive advantage that your call center has been missing. It truly has the potential to make a monumental impact on your organization's bottom line.
How Speech Analytics Technology Can Improve Your Business
When used in the correct manner, this breakthrough technology has the potential to drastically improve the customer experience. Speech analytics is highly complex software designed to filter vast amounts of audio data and study it for specific nuances. The technology is so advanced that it can pick up on the subtlest hints of stress or emotion in customers' voices. It is also engineered to decipher customer motivations for initiating calls, to pick up on specific products mentioned during phone calls and plenty more. Companies that rely on speech analytics can analyze this data to identify customer desires, needs and expectations. It's sort of like the synthesis between the "eye in the sky" and futuristic mind reading devices. There is no doubt that speech analytics technology is one of the most intriguing technological advancements of our time.
Boost Service Quality
Speech analytics software monitors the words spoken by call center agents as well as the customers they speak to. It is hard to believe that this technology can record and analyze both sales representatives’ voices and customers' voices simultaneously. Yet the technology is proven to not only work, but work with remarkable efficiency. This is the perfect tool to coach call center representatives. Call center managers who have this key data at their disposal will be empowered to enhance first call resolution and decrease total call volume. All operational and performance issues can be easily monitored and managed, resulting in better overall service quality.
Decrease Operating Expenses
Some organizations report that speech analytics can actually pay for itself in as little as three months. Most organizations enjoy considerable savings within the first six to nine months. It is quite rare that this technology takes an entire year to pay for itself. When properly measured, most contact center managers find that the software actually results in considerable profits long before the first year passes. It is programmed to identify cost savings and pinpoint specific ways for contact centers to decrease specific areas of spending that do not generate profits. Speech analytics is all about enhancing contact center efficiency with an eye on the bottom line.
A Way to Pinpoint Cross-sell and Upsell Opportunities
Contact center managers and their sales management peers rely on speech analytics to uncover cross-sell and upsell opportunities. The result is often a monumental boost in sales conversion rates. The data provided by this groundbreaking technology can even identify how distinct cross-sell and upsell attempts affect customer satisfaction levels. The analysis delves even deeper: speech analytics can be employed to develop custom tailored cross-sell and upsell opportunities that cater to individual customer needs. This revolutionary software even has the potential to be used to analyze the effectiveness of specific advertising campaigns across any period of time that your organization would like to study. This is the highly detailed customer analysis software that most contact centers have long desired. Today, those dreams are fully realized.
Decrease Customer Attrition Rates
The majority of organizations that implement speech analytics technology enjoy a significant drop in customer attrition rates. This software ameliorates the customer research process by pinpointing specific motivations for customer behaviors. It explains why customers stop doing business with companies, why they continue to purchase products and even provides tips to help organizations improve customer retention.
The Real Time Call Analysis Your Organization Has Been Missing
Speech analytics technology is so advanced that it can actually study patterns in voice calls in real time. This means that you won't have to wait for the software to produce useful results. The system studies voice inflections, tones and sentiments to determine emotion as well as satisfaction. It also links user-defined word strings to distinct agent responses. This can all be performed while phone conversations between customers and agents are actually happening. The software presents users with highly detailed data that provides insight as to what needs to be fixed and the types of solutions that can be implemented for improvements. Take note of this data stream and you will be able to immediately identify positive and negative interactions between contact center agents and customers. Use the insights provided by speech analytics data to critique your agents' performances and recommend courses of action that will improve customer interactions. All of this can occur within days, hours or minutes, depending on how quickly you would like to implement the data provided by the technology. Some will choose to pull aside agents in a moment's notice and immediately review their performance according to the information gleaned from speech analytics software. Other contact center managers will choose to evaluate a large amount of call data across an extended period of time and develop strategic business processes to optimize future agent-customer interactions.
A Highly Customizable Means of Evaluating Your Contact Center Operations
Speech analytics software is so advanced that contact center owners and managers can customize it to pick up on distinct phrases. Perhaps you would like the speech analytics software to pick up on the exact number of times that customers or agents say the words, “Thank you”. Or maybe you would like to monitor how frequently customers reference competitors. You can even tailor the technology to pick up on how often customers reference specific products sold by competitors. The software will not only identify these words and phrases, but also provide call center agents with helpful suggestions for responses. You have to see this software in action to fully appreciate its remarkable capabilities. Imagine one of your contact center representatives struggling through a difficult phone call with a potential customer. He is unsure of how to respond to an inquiry or comment until his computer's speech analytics software provides a list of response alternatives to catalyze the phone call toward a more positive direction. This technology really can mean the difference between customer hang ups and highly persuasive dialogues that dramatically boost conversion rates.
Furthermore, speech analytics technology can be customized to track instances of silence as well as voice tones. This might seem like trivial information on the surface, yet it can provide valuable insights as to how frequently customers are “left hanging” on phone calls or instances when they become agitated or frustrated with agents. The software can even pick up on voice tones during a call recording to determine the likely age group of potential/existing customers. You can use this information for a number of important purposes such as gauging the impact of advertising campaigns on distinct age demographics.
Speech Analytics Technology: The Call Center Control You Deserve
Once armed with the speaker identification, talk analysis, emotion detection and audio mining tools provided by speech analytics technology, you will have the ability to greatly improve your call center operations. These high-tech features will enable you to key in on important items that are critical to your call center's success. Many contact center owners and managers will rely on this technology to determine which agents fail to state phrases that are critical to your company's legal compliance requirements. Speech analytics technology makes this possible and also tabulates the number of times that such phrases are omitted by specific agents. Or maybe you would like to mine your contact center's audio for instances when customers attempt to cancel a purchase, lodge a complaint or terminate their account. Perhaps you would like to know when agents fail to provide customers with a salutation. All of these analyses are at your fingertips thanks to speech analytics technology. This is the next generation contact center business solution you have long desired.
About the Author: Jeanne Landau has over 10 years of experience leading the marketing, social media and content programs for 800response and CallFinder. For over 25 years, 800response has been providing toll-free vanity 800 phone numbers to businesses in North America, with the goal of increasing consumer recall rates when used in advertising, while providing detailed call tracking and call monitoring data for ad campaign analysis. In 2012, Jeanne was an integral member of the team that developed and launched CallFinder, a cloud-based call recording and speech analytics solution that helps companies capture and analyze the voice of customers, develop call monitoring and quality assurance practices, and improve the customer experience. Prior to working with 800response and CallFinder, she executed public relations programs on behalf of clients while at Edelman Worldwide in New York, NY. You can contact Jeanne at [email protected] or 1-800-317-8060.
Edited by
Dominick Sorrentino
