Long pauses. Changes in vocal tone. Mentioning a competitor. These are all things that happen regularly during a call from a customer to a contact center, and they can offer all kinds of information to a contact center manager—which upselling or cross-selling programs are working, how well your agents are sticking to their scripts, trends in customer satisfaction. It’s amazing, really, what can be learned simply from a person’s voice and the words they use.
But of course, all this information is pretty useless unless you have a way of capturing it. Agents can’t do it during live calls, as their focus has to be on resolving the issue at hand. And managers certainly don’t have the time to listen to massive samplings of calls to identify common problems or successes.
That’s why so many contact centers are using speech analytics software. What this software does is listen to every call and then analyze various characteristics on both the agent’s and the customer’s end. It can then provide users with trends and insights that allow them to make decisions that will move their contact center further toward success.
And one of the best parts for busy contact center managers? You don’t have to listen to any calls in order to gain those insights. Instead, they’re all laid out for you by the speech analytics software itself.
That, no doubt, will make contact center staff happier. But it can help on the customer’s end, too. Here are a few of the ways that speech analytics can help you make your customers happier.
One thing speech analytics is able to do is analyze and categorize calls that have long periods of silence. Customers rarely like being put on hold—that much everybody knows. But it may be hard to figure out ways to avoid these long hold times when using the typical quality control methods, like random sampling.
Most speech analytics software can block these calls into a single category, so that contact center managers are able to see what process seems to be resulting in the long hold times. Is it the need to access more customer data than is available in a single screen? Is it a slow, overworked computer system? Perhaps you need to take a look at your technology. Or perhaps it’s that your agents having trouble addressing a certain kind of issue. In this case, some extra training could be called for.
Being able to eliminate unnecessary holds can go a long way toward increasing customer satisfaction, plus make your agents more efficient and able to handle more calls in less time.
In industries where compliance is an issue, it’s even more important that your agents stay on script and offer the right options to customers. Speech analytics software can aid in this by listening to the call, then giving real-time prompts when the agent needs to use a certain word or phrase.
These prompts can also be used to aid in other issues, like urging an agent to talk more slowly, or providing information to help them respond to a customer’s question or comment. This can create smoother, more effective calls, which in turn can lead to happier customers.
Resolving the customer’s problem on the first call is an important goal for contact centers, as is increasing first call resolution rate. Speech analytics can help with this, too. One way is through the live prompting agents receive from the software, which can not only help them remember to say the right script, but also remind them to provide the caller with all the necessary information during the very first call.
Another way, however, is live quality monitoring. With live quality monitoring, the software can detect when an issue is being escalated, a customer is becoming angry, or other undesirable situations are occurring, and flag the call for intervention from a supervisor. That way, it’s more likely that whatever issue the caller is having will be resolved before it gets out of hand.
Do you think your customers could benefit from your contact center’s use of speech analytics software? To learn more about the system, watch our video on Verint’s Speech Analytics. If you like what you see, contact us!
