Intense competition and economic challenges require that every company prioritize the experience other customers. Effective call center strategies contribute to the success of farms in practically every industry and market.
So far, call center technologies have evolved to integrate multiple channels into a single call center. Email, live chat, text messaging, and other digital communications have improved the accessibility of brands and simplified the job of analyzing customers, agents and issues. In spite of such progress, however, the majority of customers continue to use the telephone when they have a question or service issue.
For a long time, companies have conducted customer service evaluation and optimization tasks using information from digital communications combined with time and volume-based metrics from voice calls. Such processes have positively contributed to customer-centric business models, but have resulted in mountains of untapped data in the form of recorded voice conversations.
Call center managers and supervisors can only manually review a small percentage of voice interactions and often miss important indicators of the root-cause of contacts, agent competence, and operational inefficiencies. Speech analytics changes that.
Because of the emergence of technology that can quickly analyze voice communications, companies can gain new insights into the markets that they serve and find ways to precisely target agent training. In other words, using speech analytics to create an optimal customer experience can give businesses an important competitive edge.
Defining Speech Analytics
Speech analytics give call centers the ability to mine the information contained in voice calls. Since one-on-one calls continue to dominate the customer service landscape, access to all of the information that they contain can give companies opportunities to understand customer behavior and evaluate the performance of agents and operations.
Speech Analytics in Customer Service
Call centers that have speech analytics tools in place give managers the ability to gain important insights into the reasons for incoming calls as well as customer attitudes and behaviors. In the past, only a fraction of voice calls could be manually monitored and analyzed. Now, speech analytics make real-time analysis possible, helping companies and their call centers quickly respond to operational issues and customer concerns.
Companies can determine if the need to acquire speech analytics if they have difficulty understanding the reasons behind incoming voice calls. Additionally, a firm might need speech analytics if they need additional information regarding the conduct of agents and callers during conversations. Furthermore, companies that want to evaluate the factors that affect customer relationships can benefit from speech analytics technology.
Ultimately, having an awareness of caller intent, key behaviors and customer sentiment can combine to increase the competitiveness and efficiency of a company while improving profitability. Speech analytics, therefore, often represents a necessity for firms that hope to remain relevant in the modern economy.
Using Speech Analytics to Improve Customer Experience
The customer experience created by a firm directly affects its profitability and long-term success. Knowing this, practically every organization can benefit from having speech analytics in their call center. The following advantages offer a sample of how speech analytics can improve customer service.
Improved First-Call Results
Information gleaned in real time from speech analytics can supply agents with important clues as to the reason behind each a call, giving them the ability to provide relevant assistance. Also, over the long-term, managers can improve first-call resolution rates by streamlining operations and implementing training in ways that enable the call center to quickly resolve the most common types of calls.
Decreased Call Handling Time
The additional service precision made possible by speech analytics reduces the number of calls needed to resolve customer issues. As a result, average handling times decline and efficiency improves.
Identification of Caller Intent
Speech analytics improves the real-time and long-term ability of call center agents and managers to determine caller intent. As a matter of fact, this type of information can contribute to the development of streamlined internal processes that accelerate the resolution of the most common reasons for calls. Consequently, firms can preemptively address such issues and thereby the number of incoming calls.
Silence Optimization
In call centers, silence means just as much as, if not more than, words. Speech analytics systems can make silence just as searchable as spoken words and assign it meaning. Such non-speech signals can help managers provide training that reduces the amount of silence during voice conversations. As a result, agents can decrease handling times and thereby improve efficiency.
Customer Retention
The capability to analyze vocabulary, intent, and emotion via speech analytics can automatically identify customers that will likely abandon a brand. By acting on this information, companies can take remedial action to furnish at-risk clients with special attention that can salvage relationships.
Increased Customer Satisfaction
Every contribution made by speech analytics can directly increase caller satisfaction. For example, faster, more accurate issue resolution saves customers time and creates desirable outcomes. Additionally, the higher levels of agent and manager competence can reduce the number of incoming calls and decrease the number of mishandled issues.
Agent Evaluation
In the past, managers had only enough time to mannualy monitor and evaluate a handfull of calls. Such a constraint limited the perspective of agent performance reviews. Speech analytics automatically evaluates calls, giving managers and supervisors a thorough understanding of how well agents do their job. As a result, good performance can more often be rewarded and deficiencies can be addressed. Ultimately, speech analytics improves the work environment and thereby boosts employee retention.
Must-Channel Consistency
Now that firms can apply similar analytics to voice calls to those used for digital channels such as email and live chat, companies can take steps to ensure that the call center provides consistent messaging that is independent of how customers prefer to interact with a brand.
Compliance Monitoring
Speech analytics takes the guesswork out of what actually transpires during voice calls, giving companies the ability to ensure that agents comply with internal procedures. Equally important, call centers can comply with legal and regulatory requirements and have proof to establish their compliance should they ever face an audit.
Using speech analytics for optimal customer experience gives companies numerous competitive advantages that help understand and retain customers while improving efficiency. In many settings, speech analytics can also increase employee retention and operational compliance to reduce cost while simultaneously improving quality.
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