With the controversy that offshore contact and call centers can create, it doesn’t help the situation if the customer calling the center cannot understand the person with whom they are trying to communicate. Such a scenario often leads to customer frustration and even agent frustration, increasing the risk of the organization losing both. To keep this trend at bay, many centers are implementing solutions to address language skills.

 

To respond to this growing demand, Nexidia (News - Alert) has announced the availability of Nexidia Language Assessor. The developer and provider of effective phonetic-based technology for rich media and speech analytics solutions made the announcement today.

 

Nexidia Language Assessor is designed to enable organizations to automate language assessment as part of new CSR (Customer Service Representative) recruiting and ongoing training. Nexidia Language Assessor is the first of its kind and automates a large portion of the labor intensive language skills assessment process, while ensuring consistent application of language standards.

 

Testing a person’s fluency and pronunciation skills in a specified language with the use of automating spoken language skill assessment can enable an organization to better align a CSR’s language skills with customer needs, which is a critical element of customer satisfaction.

 

A poor customer experience is often the result of customers having difficulty understanding CSRs at offshore call centers. The Call Center Satisfaction Index published by the CFI Group reported that CSRs with poor communication skills revolved problems only 45 percent of the time, compared 88 percent resolution by those representatives who speak clearly.

 

Nexidia Language Assessor is based on the company’s patented technology and compares candidates’ recorded reading of a script to the phonetic standard of that language, measuring the quality of pronunciation and fluency. The technology is used to review, score and rank the recorded data, ultimately assisting companies with their preliminary evaluation of hundreds of applicants within minutes.

 

Call centers can also use the technology for ongoing training to assist CSR’s language skills by showing exact areas where improvement is needed. Such ability can create more targeted training to improve the agent’s performance quickly and reduce wasted time and money spent training on areas where it is not needed.

 

“Improving the quality of customer communication is a key initiative for the majority of our clients,” said John Willcutts, president and chief executive officer of Nexidia, in a Tuesday statement.  “In response to this need, we were able to leverage our core technology to deliver Nexidia Language Assessor and further extend our clients’ abilities to rapidly assess and act upon key skill sets affecting customer experience.”

 

Nexidia Language Assessor is available today in all 33 languages supported by Nexidia.

 

Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMC (News - Alert) and has also written for eastbiz.com. To see more of her articles, please visit Susan J. Campbell’s columnist page.