Article

Transform Your Contact Center with Speech and Text Analytics

Speech and text analytics help extract meaning from your contact center agents’ conversations with customers so you can better understand their needs and address them more effectively.

Successful contact centers thrive on data. But for too many, that data can be incredibly difficult to access and synthesize into meaningful information for a variety of reasons: unclean or incomplete data, data that is spread across multiple platforms, or even a lack of understanding of what metrics to focus on, just to name a few.

Speech and text analytics help extract meaning from your contact center agents’ conversations with customers so you can better understand their needs and address them more effectively.

Below, we’ll be walking through how you can combine advanced analytics like speech and text to build a clearer picture of what decisions need to be made to amplify your contact center’s success.

Real-World Advantages

In 2019, McKinsey reported that contact centers that leveraged advanced analytics like speech and text were able to reduce average handle time by up to 40%, increase self-service containment rates by 5 to 20%, cut employee costs by up to $5 million, and boost the conversion rate on service-to-sales calls by nearly 50% — all while improving customer satisfaction and employee engagement.

While implementation also includes coaching and streamlining your data and internal processes, when done correctly, you can leverage this information to drive better outcomes, without the need for specialized data experts such as:

  • Tracking and addressing agent performance by automatically setting a trigger when the platform identifies behavior from agents that have been predefined such as excessive transfers and extended hold times.
  • Pinpointing hot topics and the sentiments around them by creating an automation playbook to alert the product team if there is an influx of calls reflecting dissatisfaction around a specific product.
  • Improving overall call scoring by leveraging key phrases and sentiment analysis.

Common Contact Center Pain Points

In a fast-paced world with ever-evolving changes, businesses need timely access to accurate data and insights to plan for future success and pivot quickly when the opportunity arises. Lacking a foundational approach to tracking and understanding data leaves too many opportunities on the table for failure. Take a look at common signs that there might be gaps in your data foundations.

While basic data and analytics are fast becoming the norm, McKinsey reports that in 2019 only 37% of contact centers felt that they are using advanced analytics to create value. The report also points out that early data and analytics solutions helped companies understand the past and the present performance of their contact centers, “advanced analytics generate actionable insights regarding what will happen next, through both internal and customer-facing applications.”

Gaps in Reporting Due to Incomplete Data

Contact centers generate plenty of data but that data often gets lost. This can be due to data silos, which happen when raw data is accessible to one department but not another, incompatibility between legacy tools and newer ones, or an overly complex approach to tracking, scoring and reporting. Not only are you left with an inaccurate picture of your business as a result, but you waste valuable time and resources trying to make sense of the data in the end.

Poor Customer Experience

When you don’t have enough or the right insight into each interaction between your agents and customers, you cannot effectively address problems on either end. Monitoring the right metrics unlocks your ability to make data-driven decisions rather than guessing or going off a “hunch.” When your agents are struggling, it can mean they are feeling unsupported or lack the tools or training needed. With the right information, you can make data-driven improvements to your staffing, tech stack, or training and mentoring programs. Tracking contact center KPIs across the customer lifecycle gives you an end-to-end view of how your customers interact with your business, and how they feel about it.

Considering the above, you’re likely wondering:

  • How would it change your decision-making to have access to any and all the information you need in one place?
  • What if all your managers and agents knew exactly what actions to take in every interaction or business decision?
  • What if you could score all calls and interactions, making all customer-agent interactions as frictionless as possible?

Speech and text analytics go beyond the “what” and give you deeper insight into the “why” by surfacing relevant data such as sentiment analysis and topic trends. This equips you with information to make key decisions for the organization, all the while empowering your agents with what they need to better serve customers.

Using Speech and Text Analytics to Get the Most Out of Your Conversations

With the ever-growing need for businesses to understand a customer’s full journey, the global speech analytics market size is expected to grow from USD 1.5 billion in 2020 to USD 3.8 billion by 2025 while the text analytics market is set to reach a value of $14.84 billion by 2026. These numbers come as no surprise as only real-time advanced analytics can provide precise numbers needed for the full picture. Let’s take a deeper look at how tracking speech and text analytics is a critical piece of that 360-degree view.

Speech and text analytics allow your businesses to learn what you may not yet know. It has the power to analyze millions of transactions across all channels – from traditional phone call recordings, call transcriptions, to even emails and text messages – to surface trends and patterns that lead to critical business insights.

1. Surface actionable data

Through both speech and sentiment analysis, you can learn more about your customers’ pain points and identify business or product areas that require investigation. You will also be able to quickly hone in on changing customer trends so that you can proactively adapt to best meet customers wants and needs.

2. Increase agent retention

Feedback is the key to agent success, but it’s impossible for contact center managers to monitor and analyze every call. With the ability to tease out the sentiment of both the customer and the agent and identify topics such as “Lack of knowledge” or “Lack of compliance,” you can coach agents who need guidance and improvement while providing positive feedback to agents who effectively display concepts like politeness and ownership. Agents who feel supported and rewarded are more likely to stay.

3. Improve the customer experience

Ultimately, when you know better, you can do better. By using both speech and text analysis, you can derive meaning from interactions across all channels and turn what would otherwise be unstructured data into structured, actionable, and even visual information that can be easily understood throughout the organization at large.

Understanding what sort of hiccups come up in your multi-channel environment, how your organization is viewed by customers, and where agents fall short are all helpful tools to arm yourself with when it comes to making better, more data-informed decisions.

SentimentAnalysis

How to Deploy Speech and Text Analytics in Your Contact Center

An AI-powered contact center will allow you to serve your customers more effectively while increasing efficiency and helping you achieve organizational goals. But it’s not as simple as finding the tech, setting it, and forgetting it. To be successful in leveraging advanced analytics in your contact center, you need to:

  1. Clearly identify your business goals and objectives for your desired growth;
  2. Do your research and select a platform that not only solves for your specific challenges but ensures your data is as actionable as it is accessible now and in the future as you grow;
  3. Combine all data into one, centralized location for a holistic, cross-channel approach;
  4. Define which workflows and metrics will set your agents up for success the most. This will become useful in both your reporting and when creating automations based on data insights. Once implemented;
  5. Be sure to use your results to identify training and coaching opportunities and other areas of improvement.

In Summary

It’s time to put yourself above the competition by leveraging the treasure trove of information at your fingertips and turning it into actionable insights. Speech and text analytics help you make the most out of each and every conversation with a customer by helping you go beneath the surface of just what they’re saying into the meat of their inquiries in real-time. Furthermore, AI-driven analytics also offers predictive insights, thanks to the constantly learning, automated technology, so that you can proactively address any gaps in your customers’ needs or your agents’ actions.

Ready to transform your contact center? Get in touch to see how SuccessKPI’s all-in-one platform brings all of your data into a single view powered with speech and text analytics and automated actions to transform your enterprise-grade contact center.

About the Author

Erin Stewart, Senior Director of Enterprise Sales at SuccessKPI, is focused on helping organizations turn digital implementations into digital transformations. In 2019, Erin completed coursework at the M.I.T Sloan School of Management concentrating on Artificial Intelligence- Implications for Business Strategy and she was named “Best Woman in Software and Technology Sales” by Women in Sales - North America. In 2020, Erin and her team were honored to be awarded the Top Receivables Product of the Year in the January/February issue of ReceivablesAdvisor magazine. Most recently, Erin is honored to be a Judge for the Women in Sales - North America 2021 Awards.