The demand for modern contact centre agents is always increasing – whether that’s from managing hybrid working or dealing with omni-channel requests. Traditional forms of coaching can only go so far in equipping agents to deal with every scenario they might encounter. Enter conversation intelligence solutions paired with real-time feedback to train and assist agents wherever they may be.
In an exclusive interview, CX Today welcomes Surbhi Rathore, CEO and co-founder, and Vikram Modgil, Head of Growth, at conversation intelligence company Symbl.ai, to discuss how real-time coaching can benefit agents as well as many other types of workers.
One of the benefits of Symbl.ai’s conversation intelligence approach to agent coaching is that it is holistic. “Our technology, instead of sampling a few calls, look at 100% of the calls. That gives you a complete idea versus just getting partial information,” says Modgil. That enables companies to dig down into every facet of an interaction. “Our technology lets you listen for certain behavioural aspects like politeness, empathy, confusion and all kinds of soft and transactional skills. People can even self-coach. If you are an agent who uses a lot of filler words, you can automatically alert yourself if you’re doing too much of it. One of our customers found that if there is too much silence on a call, customer satisfaction scores drop. Setting an alert for that helps to get results right away. It’s all about continuous improvement.”
Tracking Custom Definitions
This is enabled by Symbl.ai’s tracker technology, which lets users define areas they want to target, either in real-time or after the fact. Modgil uses the example of customer confusion. “If a customer is saying, ‘can you please repeat that?’, or ‘I don’t understand’, or ‘how do I do this?’, that indicates confusion. Those sentences then act as a definition of confusion. That’s then sent alongside the real-time audio stream for classification, and an immediate response is returned saying confusion detected now.”
That response can then be turned into action of the user’s choosing. “You might display some helpful text or a how-to document, for instance,” says Rathore. “Combine that with Symbl.ai’s additional capabilities for topic detection. If you’re talking about changing a battery in a sensor and the current condition is confusion, it can for instance provide an article for you to refer to.” Rathore emphasises that the approach goes well beyond keyword matching. “We use machine learning in order to find similarities to what you’ve already configured based on our contextual understanding. The fundamental idea is to use machine learning and context understanding to find similarities of what you’ve already configured.”
Such an approach allows companies to pick up parameters that would otherwise be very difficult to track. “We have several open-source examples that we have shared with our customers, so they’re able to track very complex and atypical scenarios, specific to their needs,” says Modgil. “One of our customers wanted to track any conflicts with the manager. They called that specific KPI ‘having a backbone’. There really are infinite possibilities in terms of what you can track and coach your team on.” Because of that, there are no limits on coaching use cases. “Agent coaching doesn’t just mean contact centre for us, because it also applies to outbound calls for sales, or marketing. For Symbl.ai, our first step was to be able to let people define what they want to track. As we are exposed to more and more of the triggers and events that businesses are looking for, we are creating a collective knowledge base to share amongst businesses.”
Conversational Coaching Assistance
Aside from improving performance, coaching also finds a home in ensuring organisational and regulatory compliance. “In regulated industries like finance, there are regulatory aspects that we can help implement very easily. When a person residing in California can open a bank account over the phone with you, you can very easily find yourself out of compliance – unless you are able to quickly access that information.” Beyond that, Rathore is clear that the technology has applications across industries. “There are applications in field marketing, train the trainer programmes, coaching interviewers based on previous interviews in the recruitment sector. Even doctors can improve conversation quality with patients by making sure they are empathetic enough. From an application standpoint, having conversational coaching assistance has a lot of potential.”
Looking to the future, Symbl.ai expects its solution to continue to change the game for agent coaching and beyond – something that’s become increasingly important in the ongoing pandemic. “Many agents don’t have the support system they used to,” says Rathore. “When you’re in the office, you can turn to your boss and ask for help, but when you’re remote – it’s very difficult. This industry is known for having a lot of churn. The average retention rate is very low. So all the time you’re introducing new people who are not experts in your product. That means longer hold times, more delays and losses of business opportunities. We want to empower developers and builders in an organisation to create a scalable solution that captures and uses knowledge in real-time, customising the experience based on the use cases within the company.”
To find out more about Symbl.ai’s conversation intelligence offering, go here.
