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Take Recording to the Next Level - Mine Calls to Extract Business Intelligence

by Laura Noonan, VP Marketing, 800response/CallFinder - March 25, 2013

Take Recording to the Next Level - Mine Calls to Extract Business Intelligence

By Laura Noonan, VP Marketing, 800response/CallFinder

Analyzing business calls to find the “voice” of customers is becoming standard business practice among companies of all sizes and industries, and within contact centers. More and more, simply recording calls and monitoring a sample with a goal toward “quality assurance” is becoming an inadequate process in the face of the growing trend to respond to the dynamic and fluid wants and needs of a business’ customer base (past, present and future). Business owners and call center/contact center managers are realizing that the conversations taking place every day between their employees, agents and customers hold much more valuable information than previously understood, and which traditional call recording alone cannot provide.

The Business Value of Call Recording with Speech Analytics

Implementing call recording that is enabled with speech analytics technology into daily operations provides enormous value to the business overall, as well as to the many departments within a company that field incoming calls, which hold a wealth of valuable business information.

When a business adopts a speech analytics solution, they have access to:

· Call recordings of every conversation in real time

· Call categorization in real time, based on search definitions

· Top-line search statistics such as number of calls found, and number of calls that contain a specific search phrase

Six Uses of Speech Analytics for Companies and Contact Centers (in-house and outsourced)

With recording and speech analytics technology in place, businesses can close the knowledge gaps within various departments or business units by recording and analyzing calls to extract valuable data and gauge how well they are addressing everyday business challenges.

Common uses for speech analytics include:

1. Monitoring the Customer Experience, Improving Retention and Reducing Churn

The front line of communication is a common focus for a speech analytics solution, in order to help companies address customer service quality within their organizations and provide actionable analysis that is necessary to build better tools and training programs for their agents. Searches may uncover poorly handled calls, common complaints, and specific agent knowledge gaps, allowing a business to quickly identify areas that need process improvements and coaching focus.

Speech analytics also allows contact center managers to keep a pulse on customer satisfaction levels as a result of their interactions with agents, allowing managers to fine-tune training programs to ensure that agents are performing according to business standards. Better informed employees will lead to higher customer retention levels, and help reduce customer churn.

2. Extracting Business Intelligence

Businesses without a speech analytics system in place miss opportunities to discover the critical intelligence hidden within the phone conversations they are having with their customers. Not only can speech analytics provide knowledge on overall customer satisfaction, but it can also uncover insights on a business’ products and trends in their markets, and capture the latest promotions, strategies and messages that top competitors are sending out in the market. Having this knowledge empowers a company to adjust their own campaigns, strategies and tactics to overcome the threat of competition and respond to marketplace demands and expectations.

3. Reducing Costs, Improving Revenues

Using speech analytics to identify the content of calls and the associated business departments, inherently improves efficiencies by monitoring and categorizing every incoming call in its entirety and will effectively reduce costs and increase revenues. High volume, long duration, and repeat calls will give indications of where an organization may be able to reduce average call handling times, improve first call resolution performance, and identify any causes for long duration calls that can be addressed to save agent time and the company money.

Having efficient processes in place to respond to certain calls, either with customer interaction and follow up, or by internal process change, will improve business operations and efficiencies overall, thereby reducing costs.

4. Monitoring Script Compliance

Failure on the part of employees, whether they are in sales or customer service, to follow a mandated script or business process, often leads to issues with customer satisfaction and efficiency, and could put your business at risk, particularly if you operate in a regulated world.

Detailed searches created within a speech analytics solution will help isolate non-compliant calls and the agents who go off-script, providing a jump on risk mitigation and the development of improved training programs to ensure 100% compliance.

5. Developing Effective Employee Training Programs

Workforce training and coaching programs are critical for employee development. Custom searches will allow companies to pinpoint any call where a customer-facing employee has been successful at saving a customer that called to cancel, or find calls where an employee has gone off-script. These insights can help a company develop and adjust internal training programs to address a myriad of scenarios that employees encounter.

This powerful solution equips managers and trainers with the knowledge and tools for success, while providing an effective way for employees to understand their strengths and weaknesses, and focus on improving performance.

6. Resolving Disputes

Common phrases that go hand-in-hand with a cancelling account gives a business the ability to identify recurring objections and reasons associated with customers wishing to cancel a service or purchase. This knowledge provides clear insights to justify a shift in marketing strategy, key messaging, adjustments to pricing strategies, and changes that may be necessary to corporate training and support programs so that customer disputes and cancellations decrease.


Choosing the Right Type of Speech Analytics Technology:

There are two main technologies used to power speech analytics: speech-to-text and phonetics-based. Speech-to-text technology is based on a large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) engine, which translates audio recordings into searchable text. Speech-to-text is dependent upon a language model and dictionary to identify words correctly.

A phonetics-based speech analytics product scans the recordings and uses the original audio files to identify the string of phonemes (the smallest units of sound that make up language) that match the search criteria. The phonetics-based technology does not require a language model or dictionary, meaning indexing and searching audio files is more rapid than speech-to-text. Phoneme-based speech analytics also allow for broader search terms including industry jargon, product names, acronyms, multiple languages, accents and dialects, and provide more accurate and customizable results.

More technology providers are moving to offering cloud-based solutions. Cloud-based solutions offer real-time analysis of customers’ wants and needs at a dramatically lower cost to implement and support than hardware based analytics products, allowing businesses to quickly and affordably tap into hidden intelligence.

In fact, some contact center industry insiders consider the move to cloud-based speech analytics to be one of the most important developments in contact center operations.

Finally, where calls are recorded and how they are process through the chosen speech analytics solution is important. Using a provider that processes incoming calls through their own platform, recording and analyzing them, has inherent benefits. The process is smoother, faster and their services can be more affordable since there are no third-party recording vendors involved.

It is critical to address these issues before delving into a contract or purchase of a speech analytics solution.

Laura Noonan has 19 years of experience working with the SMB market. She leads the marketing teams at 800response and CallFinder, delivering telecommunications solutions and web-based marketing technology tools including sophisticated call routing platforms, real-time call tracking, call recording, speech analytics, and toll-free 800 number service. Contact Laura at 1-802-860-0378 or email lnoonan@800response.com.



 
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