Using Speech Analytics to Improve the Customer Experience

In 2020, Call Centre Helper released a whitepaper titled “What Contact Centres Are Doing Right Now”. It asked hundreds of global contact centre professionals and telecoms experts if they believed the uptake of speech analytics will increase during the next 5-10 years.

84.1% of those surveyed believe that speech analytics will certainly escalate over the next decade. Such changes would almost certainly enhance the customer experience.

With a variety of new contact channels available at the customer’s fingertips, there is a danger that the customer journey could evolve into an overwhelming one. It is vital you have a thorough understanding of the full customer journey to help improve the service within your contact centre.

Fast and confident decisions on how best to improve customer service and employee productivity can be made if you have actionable experiences in your customer’s journey.

Enhancing the Customer Experience

In a recent podcast, Luke Genoyer from Global Call Forwarding briefly spoke about how the customer experience will be improved through conversation and speech analytics.

Data from such analytics provides managers with more substantial and accessible information, allowing them to “better coach their teams and implement superior strategies to improve the customer experience.”

It should be seen as a method of enhancing your ability to listen. It can be an invaluable tool to help you listen to what matters most to your customers.

Speech analytics allows you to focus on the area where you can make the biggest difference for customers – the pain points. The analytics of calls can help you to coach your staff and make critical process improvements.

Emphasizing this point, Yasir Bugrara of Voci Technologies details how this functionality can detect when a customer is becoming frustrated, and this information is then immediately passed on to the agent or supervisor who can work to mitigate dissatisfaction using proven methods.

This is due to real-time analytics having the ability to listen for keywords and phrases and also specific vocal inflections, for example detecting if there is a shift in the customer’s tone.

Along with real-time analytics, real-time prompting/prompts can also be enabled. This is usually a feature on the agent’s desktop that tracks the progress of each call, highlighting opportunities for alternative product choices, upsells, and cross-sells.

The Need for Proactive Management

Matthew Lawlor, Spearline CTO, also shared his insights about speech analytics, and how poor audio quality can have an adverse effect, resulting in inaccurate analytics.

“Speech-to-text, trend analysis, and automatic call routing are core features of speech analytics that should be implemented wherever possible to streamline processes, reduce inefficiencies, and improve customer experience.”

However, in order for speech analytics to operate effectively and to provide the correct information to agents and management, proactive management of voice channels is a necessity.

Lawlor stated how poor audio quality could result in inaccurate analytics or, worse still, the inability to utilize the data contained within a call.

He believes that because the implementation of speech analytics can require a significant initial investment, “it should therefore be supported by ensuring strong network quality at all times.”

It is important to build a clear perspective of consumer interactions through analytics. You should focus on what actually matters when enhancing customer service by identifying the words that consistently occur in conversations or highlighting when 90% of customers are asking the same questions.

You may also predict a client’s future needs by doing so, which is very beneficial at a time when consumer expectations are rising and changing in equal measures.

By analyzing all customer interactions, contact centres are provided with insights into the customer journeys, which will enable the organization to be more proactive.

You can read more insights surrounding the implementation of speech analytics from some of the leading thought leaders in the telco industry in the Call Centre Helper article ‘A Checklist for Implementing Speech Analytics’.

Proactive management of your communication channels helps you build customer loyalty through the delivery of high-quality service processes, and maximizes your ROI in technologies such as speech analytics.