The Rise of REAL Speech Analytics
The first time I heard about speech analytics I was in awe. I was running an IVR company and could barely get the IVR prompts to be understood.
The first time I heard about speech analytics I was in awe. I was running an IVR company and could barely get the IVR prompts to be understood. How on earth could anyone be analyzing whole sentences? I spent a few days in a contact center with a friend to see the fuss and was disappointed. Turns out they weren’t getting all the words but even these early products were starting to make progress by spotting really troublesome and pervasive problems. The problem was it took millions of utterances and thousands of hours to make this stuff work. Fast forward a decade and everything has changed. New technology from the likes of Amazon and Google have fundamentally changed the raw materials and speech transcription JUST WORKS! And in dozens of languages. With the advent of tools like SuccessKPI, the setup takes MINUTES! I know I am not supposed to break character this early in the blog but the magic created by the likes of Amazon is nothing short of breathtaking. But it needs to be accessible. And that is where the magic starts to happen! Let’s take a closer look at what is happening.
AI-Powered Call Center Speech Analytics Is the Future of Enterprise Customer Service Post-COVID-19
Artificial intelligence sits at the intersection of call center speech analytics and quality management. Once considered a pipe dream for contact centers, AI is actively changing the contact center as we know it. According to a survey by Gartner, AI is one of the top five customer experience (CX) trends in 2020. The survey concluded enterprises could use AI to solve problems in the customer journey they can’t solve with traditional technology. But how can we use it? Speech Analytics is a fast lane to AI in the contact center!
Today, enterprises use natural language processing and speech technology to analyze and transcribe customer support calls on a massive scale. With tools that enable instant setup, we can now analyze 100 percent of customer conversations to improve agent performance and improve customer experience.
COVID-19: And the Pandemic Helped these AI Tools to Bloom!
COVID-19 has changed the call center’s dynamics by disrupting global supply chains, employee work patterns, operations, and interaction channels.
A report published by Information Services Group said the pandemic’s global effects have forced call centers to change the way they operate. In reality, lockdowns have led to a spike in call volumes in many industries. Meanwhile, most enterprises have had to adapt to work-at-home arrangements for call center agents.
From a short-term perspective, moving agents from the office to working from home is a solution to the crisis. However, the bigger challenge enterprises have to deal with is ensuring that the work-at-home model is sustainable long term. How do we know what is happening inside conversations we cannot see OR hear?
Meeting the COVID-19 Challenge
Enterprises can invest in effective remote call center work environments to help agents continue to successfully work from home. With the right support technology in place, agents can perform their work with supervisors able to manage, coach and empower remotely. The result is a higher level of customer experience and exceptional customer experience delivered remotely.
Through the power of AI based speech analytics and machine learning, contact center management and customer experience (CX) leadership can now “listen” to millions of customers and understand what improvements are necessary. Capturing key signals across the whole customer journey helps drive operational improvements and delivers a seamless experience management 360-degree view.
Speech Analytics Is Proving New Value in Troubled Times
Across dozens of industries, we can help call center leadership reduce operational costs, enforce regulatory compliance, and identify and close knowledge gaps.
Today, speech analytics tools are helping enterprises to see customers through the COVID-19 crisis. These tools record customer calls and analyze them to extract actionable insights. Management can use these insights to:
1. Assess the Impact of COVID-19 on Customers
Organizations can use contextual analytics to identify how COVID-19 is affecting customers.
2. Identify and Solve Visibility Issues
Identification of the visibility that supervisors and managers lack to guarantee compliance, quality, and effectiveness.
3. Prioritize Business Changes and Customer Response
Intelligence gathered from speech analytics tools can help management uncover and weigh the issues affecting customers. They can use this information to prioritize response and action through data-driven evidence.
4. Ensure Agents Respond Accurately, Effectively, and Sensitively
Contact center management can analyze how agents are responding and equip them to improve outcomes.
5. Improve Remote Performance
Speech analytics can help organizations identify and address the challenges affecting the ability of work-at-home agents to serve customers.
Conclusion
Customers will remember the good and the bad from 2020 and 2021. But they will also remember how the enterprises treated them. They will remember those that supported them and got better DESPITE the crisis and gave them the information they needed to make critical decisions. They will remember those that responded with empathy and understanding. And they will also remember those that failed them. Contact center speech analytics tools can help organizations put their best foot forward in these trying times. Find out more here.
About the Author
Dave “Renny” Rennyson is the CEO of SuccessKPI. He is a passionate SaaS veteran, global executive, a lifelong learner, and the co-author of “The Art of SaaS.” Dave is obsessed with customer success, solving big problems for his customers, and building highly usable SaaS products that transform the customer experience. Prior to his role at SuccessKPI, Dave served in various senior executive roles at MicroStrategy, Genesys, Angel, Broadband Office, Interactions, Spirent, and Verizon. He enjoys running, reading, skiing, traveling, and trying to play Catan at times a bit too competitively with his family.
AI-powered speech analytics provides contact centers with real-time customer insights. As a result, supervisors and agents can understand and respond to customer needs.
The initial hurdle is to bring the data into a unified view, but simply having access to observe what’s happening in a customer journey is not enough to move the needle for businesses.
Speech Analytics has been around for a long time within contact centers but less than 5% of contact centers out there leverage this technology.
