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After IVR, Then What?

By TMCnet Staff

Speech analytics mines the conversations call center agents have with customers to make sense of the unstructured data from recordings. But the evolution of the technology now also provides real-time analytics of verbal and written interactions such as chats, emails and SMS. The benefit of analyzing all of this information has become indispensable because it is not random sampling probabilities used by traditional market research. The opinions call centers get is directly from real customers that use the product and services, making speech analytics a tool that should be standard in the call industry.

In an article by Jeanne Landau on CustomerThink.com, she goes on to explain why the success of your call center depends on speech analytics solutions.

Landau says, “By implementing call center speech analytics into a call center’s business strategy, managers of call centers are able to identify specific customer behaviors associated with positive outcomes, determine and resolve core issues by analyzing problematic customer-agent interactions, and develop best practices standards intended to streamline overall operations of their call center.”

The call center industry thrives on many data points to measure the level of their operational effectiveness. And while many might argue there are just too many metrics to keep track of, speech analytics delivers a comprehensive assessment of the conversations customers are having.

By analyzing the conversations, companies will better understand customer behaviors, intentions and meaning. This includes evaluating emotional content of customer, interpreting the amount of speech and non-speech intervals and where it took place, identifying key phrases, making automated assessments, and identifying positive and negative agent performance.

So how can these capabilities of speech analytics benefit call centers?

With speech analytics, companies are able to get the answers they need about their product and services directly from customers. For customer service, it gives clear explanations of customer behavior. The insights of these behaviors can be used to react much faster to market conditions, especially when there is a negative response.

The marketing department can use the information to launch campaigns that are more relevant to their customer base instead of launching blanket promotions that cost more money and deliver poor results.

Operations also benefit from speech analytics by identifying problems so administrators can improve internal processes. The intelligence gained from the analysis can drive workforce optimization with quality monitoring of KPIs to determine the strong and weak points of each agent. This can be used to place agents with tasks that they excel in by aligning them with skill sets that best suits the customer. 

Speech Analytics will not resolve all the woes of call centers, but the insights the technology offers can be used to execute informed decisions that deliver more tangible results.