Call analytics has been a crucial component of business growth for years now. Businesses are now turning call conversation into valuable data from identifying the caller’s identity with voice signature to lie detection by studying patterns of the voice similar to a Polygraph. In any industry, the ability to evaluate the quality of calls, the state of business interactions, and even the emotions of the customer is vital. However, in recent years, the way that we look at call analytics has changed.
The rapidly increasing demand for sensational customer experience means that businesses can no longer afford to take chances with their voice technology. Without the right analytical tools in place, your company could be missing opportunities to repair dips in call performance, overcome poor customer experience trends, and more.
I believe that analytics can form the heart of an effective customer experience strategy. However, just like any transformative technology, an analytical framework needs to start with the right foundations.
Noise Cancellation Empowers Call Analytics
We all know that customer experience is a significant driving force behind the revenue potential of any business. It’s also the driving force behind everything from customer retention to acquisition and brand identity. Noise cancellation plays an important role in the CX landscape, reducing the distractions present in a discussion between a customer and brand. When customers don’t have to repeat themselves for an agent to understand them, problems are solved faster.
However, there’s more to the benefits of noise cancellation than just improving the quality of calls. To help drive positive business outcomes, many organisations are beginning to rely on the benefits of capturing and analysing the voice of the customer. Taking phone calls and the data from those conversations from all business departments can make a massive difference to your operations.
Some call centres and larger enterprise brands have thousands of hours of voice data to unlock and explore. The information and trends that a company can glean from these enormous amounts of data are incredible. Unfortunately, just having the data isn’t enough.
Most companies learn too late that call data is only useful when the data available is high quality. If there’s background noise interference getting in the way, then your artificial intelligence and machine learning systems struggle to interpret and collect critical insights.
The unfortunate truth is that when background noise interferes with the quality of the data collected, valuable information is often left unused and untapped.
Leveraging the Power of Voice
In the modern landscape, there are many different types of information available to access. Instant chat systems on a website mean that it’s easy to collect real text-based information for bots and machine learning algorithms. However, while the popularity of these environments is growing, it’s unlikely that they’ll ever truly replace voice.
Voice is still the primary choice for communication among businesses and customers. Although omni-channel communication mediums have increased the number of platforms available, voice still leads the way when it comes to critical and empathetic connections between people.
Unfortunately, changes in the way that we work and operate each day are also reducing the quality of voice data available to businesses.
Even if you’re in a B2B business that often deals with managers and administrators from other companies, you’re not guaranteed to have a completely quiet phone call. More people than ever before are making calls on the subway, or when sitting on the bus on the way home. Now, remote and home working even mean that background noise like vacuum cleaner, TV, music, and range hoods, is a constant concern.
This constant background noise is a common, yet often overlooked plague to the business landscape, particularly when it comes to unlocking the benefits of call analytics. Any background noise could embed useless information into the data that you feed to your analytics dashboard, reducing the quality of your insights. That’s where noise cancellation filters come in.
What is a Noise Cancellation Gateway?
A Noise Cancellation Gateway helps companies to solve their problems with background noise in voice conversations. The gateway acts like a filter, identifying and removing all non-human voices. This ensures that you can maintain crystal clear audio over any business phone line.
A noise cancellation gateway means that during conversations, there’s no annoying background disruption distracting the customer or agent. Additionally, because the conversations between customers and companies are clearer, this also leads to more high-quality voice data for artificial intelligence and voice analytics systems.
Think of it like interacting with a voice assistant at home. Using AI capabilities like Alexa and Siri in the house can be much more difficult if there’s a lot of background noise. The system doesn’t know which noise to listen to. With the gateway, the external noise that confuses the AI is removed. The noise is cleaned up before the intelligent device needs to interpret a person’s request or command. This means that there’s a higher probability that the response from the assistant will be correct
The process is very similar for IVRs that use artificial intelligence. Think about someone trying to get a refill on their prescription over the phone with an automated system. They might keep hearing “I didn’t understand that” because the background noise has made it difficult for the system to pinpoint crucial keywords.
Clean Voice Data Supports More Than Just Analytics
For any business that’s thinking of adopting artificial intelligence or call analytics to improve their customer experience strategy, it’s crucial to get the foundations right first. A noise cancellation gateway ensures that the audio is clean and easy to recognise before it’s fed into the AI engine.
Many companies in the current landscape are beginning to use AI and machine learning systems in their interactive voice response systems too. In the contact centre, to help reduce the amount of work divided between human agents, companies are embedding IVRs with smart assistant technology into the customer journey. Unfortunately, it’s very common for customers to come across an IVR that can’t interpret their voice commands.
Although many issues can prevent an IVR from working properly, the most common problem is usually background noise. If there’s noise getting in the way of what your agent can understand, then customers need to constantly repeat themselves. I’ve had many no fun experiences repeating my credit card number or tracking number numerous times to the IVR without success and the frustrations escalate. Customers tend to pop the question in the head, is it me or them?
As well as helping you to access cleaner and more accurate data for your analytics, a noise cancellation gateway can also support your AI initiatives too. The noise cancellation technology filters out background noise so that customer requests can be interpreted correctly, either by a human or a robot.
As voice-based assistants become a more natural part of life for many people in the modern landscape, the ability to deliver excellent experiences through these bots will be a crucial differentiator. Adding noise cancellation to the customer journey means that you can reduce the risk of the wrong answer being given to a customer.
Everything Starts with Better Voice
In today’s digital-first landscape, it’s easy to get carried away, focusing on the fantastic benefits that interactive assistants, chatbots, and call analytics can bring to your business. All of these solutions have the potential to improve customer experience significantly, and therefore help your business to thrive. However, the latest disruptive tools only work at their best when they have the right foundations in place.
Voice and the quality of that voice will make a massive difference to any business, whether they’re investing in call analytics, interpreting voice commands with your IVR, or just aiming for clearer conversations that impress the customers.
Guest Blog by David Liu, founder and CEO of Deltapath
The Deltapath Noise Cancellation Gateway was developed in partnership with Dolby Laboratories, one of the most popular brands in the audio landscape. Leveraging Dolby’s expertise and industry knowledge, Deltapath has been able upgrade experiences for countless companies.
