Customer experience is evolving, and more than ever contact centres need to keep up to date with modern technologies to remain relevant and competitive.
Speech analytics is changing the way that contact centres operate by providing extremely powerful features that enables this critical customer contact point to deliver far better service, and resolve queries faster. This is achieved by implementing strategic and tactical interventions based on the deep insights derived from the speech analytics solution.
Building the business case for Speech Analytics
It is not difficult to build the business case for speech analytics. The positive impact that this technology has on virtually any contact centre is easy to identify, easy to measure and easy to show in terms of return on investment, or ROI.
The true Voice of the Customer is buried deep inside every call in or out of the contact centre. Speech analytics uncovers powerful insights that enables the operation to implement interventions designed to improve the overall customer experience whilst also serving to reduce costs, improve efficiencies, reduce risks and drive-up customer satisfaction and loyalty.
What’s more, speech analytics surfaces all manner of other vital and quantifiable insights such as customer verbatims or competitive product mentions. Other insights can clearly indicate process or procedure failures, product failures, customer complaints, agent performance issues, systems or technology challenges and compliance lapses.
Reducing costs by using Speech Analytics
Typically, for any well-run, technology-enable contact centre, the cost per call minute can be anything from $0.05 to $5, or even more, depending on the call type and the Average Handling Time (AHT), this can equate to a significantly high cost-per-call. To cap or reduce costs, it is vital that contact centre management isolates and mitigates all types of wastage. Using insights drawn from speech analytics, contact centres are able to accurately assess where inefficiencies or non-compliant activities or behaviours occur. These could typically include in-call silent time, agents not following prescribed scripts, call guides or processes as well as unnecessary holds or transfers or call-backs. Every second counts and unless rectified, these seconds add up to massive unnecessary costs or wastage of expensive resources.
By way of an example: A Callbi client had the benefit of immediate business value when, soon after deployment, the Callbi word cloud highlighted words that were no longer in use in the currently approved agent script and process. Agents using the incorrect script were quickly identified and this behaviour was rapidly corrected. This intervention immediately saved approximately 40 seconds per call across an estate of over 600 agents, where a significant number of agents were out of compliance. This resulted in massive savings to the operation. In this real-life case, the contact centre realised complete ROI for their investment in Callbi Speech Analytics within a few weeks of deployment.
Using speech analytics insights to improve Customer Experience
Customer and agent experience work together to create a successful and fulfilling interaction. Negative comments or sentiments from the customer, together with possible disinterest or lack of inflection or enthusiasm or insufficient training or inappropriate behaviours by the agent, can result in a highly dissatisfied customer. Speech analytics provides accurate insights that highlight critical elements of all interactions; especially those that could jeopardise the customer experience and therefore their loyalty. Using this technology ensures that 100% of all calls are automatically and effectively monitored. With rapid access to these insights, contact centres are more agile and are able to quickly implement remedial changes or interventions, and no longer need to rely on time-consuming and resource-intensive manual quality assessment of a mere fraction of the calls.
Increasing revenue by using speech analytics
Without speech analytics, contact centre managers or team leaders make many far-reaching decisions based on a small sample of recordings that have been monitored by the quality assurance (QA) team. A company using Callbi needed to find out why a particular new product they had launched was not selling. Within mere hours of writing a simple Callbi query, management used the insights from the analytics that showed that only a fraction of the agents on the floor were actively promoting the product. Armed with this new knowledge, team leaders applied their findings to the next shift. Needless to say, sales of the product increased significantly. Through quantifiable insights such as these contact centres can quickly pivot to implement changes that show fast, tangible results.
Conclusion
By using speech analytics businesses get access to powerful insights that can help to fully understand the current state and, based on this business intelligence, design the strategic and tactical interventions that are needed to improve the operation in critical focus areas. Fundamentally, speech analytics changes contact centres for the better
