Call Center Management Featured Article
Round-the-Clock Call Quality Evaluation with Speech Analytics
The public image of speech technology in customer support isn’t always a good one today. Too many of us have experienced decades-old interactive voice response (IVR) technology that asked us to “press or say our account number,” only to experience frustratingly comical results. (“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that,” chirped the system for the sixth time.) The earliest iterations of speech technology weren’t always a wild success, and memories linger for a long time.
The truth, however, is that speech technology has come a long way in recent years, and it can do so much more than pick up simple instances of human speech with varying rates of success. We may know this from our interactions with Apple’s (News - Alert) Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, but still reject the idea that speech technology today can be very smart. In the case of speech analytics, communications technology for customer support can actually determine caller intent in order to improve the overall customer journey. It can also help save agent time and money, according to a recent blog post by Monet Software (News - Alert) CEO Chuck Ciarlo.
“With speech analytics your agents can reduce the number of calls and repeat calls, as well as the length of the calls they receive,” he wrote. “Along the way you’ll also identify processes that aren’t cutting it anymore, and find ways to make them more efficient.”
Within the context of a workforce management solution, speech analytics can analyze and disseminate call center data and deliver analytics insights into the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most, such as first-call resolution and average handle time. It can help contact centers improve both of these metrics by helping agents gather the information they need to close an issue quickly and successfully.
There are other contact center functions that can benefit immensely from the ability to “listen” to human speech and determine intent.
“Speech analytics really can play an important role in so many everyday call center functions,” wrote Ciarlo. “It can be integrated into your coaching to improve quality monitoring and agent performance. Introducing a new product or marketing campaign? Speech analytics can also pick up key words and phrases that reveal how well it’s going over with customers, and whether some course adjustment would help.”
Many contact centers use speech analytics today to spot important or potentially problematic calls that contain key words such as competitors’ names, or important phrases such as “close my account” or “calling for the third time.” These solutions can also flag calls that contain aggressive language, customers and agents speaking over one another (a strong sign of conflict) or confused or elderly customers who may not be following the agents’ explanations well.
While it’s impossible for human managers to listen to all agent calls today, solutions backed by speech analytics can do so easily, allowing companies to spot problems in their processes, evaluate agent and script performance, gauge the success of a special campaign, improve products and services and red-flag problematic calls while they can still be saved.