I feel Jeff misses the point and value of real-time analytics. It’s not so much about flagging issues to a supervisor, so that they might ’step in’. Far better that an agent is able to ’self-police’ and correct any issues that occur whilst the call is still in progress.

There is an abundance of research which clearly demonstrates that the more there is a ‘conversation’ between an agent and a customer, the better the call outcome will be. It’s important to have an interaction with the customer that doesn’t give the impression that an agent is simply reading from a script.

So we can all agree that some script deviation is a good thing and that we should allow agents freedom to hold quality conversations. But the fact remains that some key things must (or should) be said in the call by the agent. Such ‘mandatory phrases’ are commonplace.

E.g.
“This call may be recorded for …….”
“The interest rate can go down as well as up ……”
“Your home may be at risk if you do not keep up payments ……”
etc.

What Real-Time speech monitoring achieves is the ability to feedback to agents that such things have been said (or not said) whilst the call is still in progress. Moreover, what the customer says can also be monitored in real-time:-

“I’d like to speak to a supervisor….”
“This is the sixth time I’ve called about this ….”
“You’re not listening to me ….”
and so on.

The value and power of this should not be underestimated. Particularly in the world of outbound, call centres go to a lot of trouble and not inconsiderable expense to reach out to the customer. When they encounter a customer who can/will engage, then why allow for the chance of that agent not saying the right thing?

Put simply, if there is anything going on in the dialogue that could be considered as the call ‘going wrong’ then by far the most effective way to deal with that is to put it right whilst the call is in progress. The best person to do that is the agent themselves. They just need the information feeding back to them, LIVE, about what they might have missed or said incorrectly.

To correct these issues after the call is over is of course possible and many call centres do that through subsequent manual evaluation of the recordings. But that is clearly an ‘after the event’ task and the chances are that any attempt to put the mistakes right once the call has long finished will meet with minimal success.

And why stop at monitoring just what the agents say? It is possible to monitor what is being said by the customer and map that to what the agent says, to be sure that the agent responds appropriately. Again, not after the event, but during the call.

Where there are FSA and similar compliance issues at stake, the ability to make sure that no agent responds in the wrong way to a customer question is invaluable.

For example, where a customer asks a question that can be considered to be asking for advice, then it can be mighty important that an agent does not give advice. They are required to give a specified response. With real-time monitoring, this can be flagged up (to the agent, the supervisor, whomever) whilst the call is in progress and the appropriate reply can be given. Thus ensuring compliance.

To simply scan the call after it is concluded can certainly flag that there was a problem, but how much effort will go into putting that right?

Regards
Rob