In virtually every industry, conversations between companies and customers have drastically changed with the COVID-19 crisis. It started with airline and travel customer calls spiking months ago about flight cancellations and refunds. Healthcare facilities and insurance companies are overrun with inquiries. Retail customers have new questions about product availability, safety concerns and delivery. Tens of millions of Americans and businesses are facing financial hardships reaching out to banking and government for support—all are facing complex inquiries from customers with new and unpredictable issues.
Answering these questions in the most efficient, empathetic way might seem like an impossible challenge. Especially when one’s army of agents is scattered everywhere, often working from home and might lack the knowledge and technical support to handle these challenges, while supervisors aren’t immediately available to answer the tough questions.
Indeed, COVID-19 is creating a perfect storm of challenges for contact centres today.
- Call overload. More customers are choosing voice channels over self-service. In these days of social distancing, they want to talk with a human being, especially when dealing with new life altering situations. Some companies we work with saw call volumes increase 50% or more at the same time they were sending employees home. Calls are longer and more complex, some of them quite emotional, dealing with critical issues. It’s definitely not business as usual
- Out-of-touch self-service. Self-service systems need significant adjustments and constant updates to manage the rapid change and complexity COVID-19 has introduced into our lives, and to convey the new digitally empathetic, crisis-oriented tone required today
How do you handle these new challenges? Speech and text analytics solutions can help.
Analytics Solutions Proving New Value in Troubled Times
Navy Federal Credit Union has been using speech analytics to address these new challenges. In the first week of the COVID-19 crisis, inbound call volume doubled and then tripled the following week. Customers were calling for payment extensions, in response to the uptick in unemployment. At the same time, 75% of the company’s contact centre agents were transitioning to work-from-home.
Speech analytics has helped the company during this unusual time to understand the reasons behind the increased call volume, determine why customers were asking for extensions and identify members who are financially challenged. The solution also helped estimate inbound arrival patterns, determine when to expect payments and navigate the unknown for the mid- to long-range forecast as historical data was no longer relevant.
“We used Speech Analytics to inform our executive teams on the 291,000 assisted extensions filed since the week of March 15, when the COVID-19 pandemic began to increase. The solution is helping them define when we can expect to see that revenue back to help them budget going forward,” said Jeff Bretana, supervisor, collections workforce management, Navy Federal Credit Union. “It’s also helping executives establish policy and determine how we can provide great member service while reducing risk of bad financial decisions with smart collection calls. In the end, we hope members had a positive experience during this crisis and Speech Analytics played a part in that.”
The short-term results speak for themselves. The company redirected resources from outbound dialling, which kept the call abandonment rate below 2% even though a majority of agents were remote. In addition, speech analytics has assisted with agent compliance and quality disclosures. It also eliminated manual letter requirements and identified website content that needed to be updated as well as other process improvements.
Support for customers
Speech analytics solutions have long helped leading organisations reduce operational costs, pinpoint and help address knowledge gaps, enforce regulatory compliance, improve customer empathy and satisfaction, reduce customer churn and increase revenue.
Today, the solutions are helping companies see their customers through the COVID-19 crisis. Coupled with solutions that record 100% of customer calls, speech analytics solutions analyse all calls and distil the results into insights that reveal:
- The most critical questions and concerns customers are calling about
- The key causes of customer confusion and frustration
- The changes to self-service and digital channels that should be considered
Armed with this knowledge, organisations are identifying the top 20% of new issues that are absolutely mission critical—“I’m exhibiting symptoms of the disease and need to see a doctor,” or “I lost my job and cannot make my payment.” These calls can continue to be handled by agents who can reassure customers, point them in the right direction and provide information about any new initiatives that will address their concerns. You can also identify the flashpoints of customer confusion/dissatisfaction and resolve the root cause of those issues.
Speech analytics also helps drive the other 80% of less urgent calls to other digital and self-service options: “Will my cruise next month be cancelled?” These less urgent inquiries still require careful consideration to make sure that self-service channels provide up-to-date, accurate and complete response for customers concerns otherwise they will likely call back. When self-service digital channels are updated effectively, they can resolve most inquiries without human involvement—thereby easing the load on already-stressed agents working from home, and relieving the bottleneck allowing the mission-critical calls to come through.
Some speech analytics solutions have a tuning capability that picks up on context cues. If the customer or agent language becomes angry, upset or irritated, it can be an indicator of building frustration and complex emotions. Crosstalk and long silence can also be a sign of trouble. These automated cues and insights can help support agents and managers to provide the appropriate coaching and guidance for agents, even when working remotely.
Support for agents and the organisation
Recently, a large telecommunications company issued a media statement that it was waiving late fees on monthly payments as a result of so many people losing their jobs. However, it discovered through speech analytics that only 10% of its agents remember to mention the waiver and were answering customer concerns about late payment properly. The result? Increased frustration and increased repeat calls to the contact centre. Once identified the appropriate communication and coaching was provided to help resolve this agent miscommunication.
Speech analytics can help ensure that you are closing any disconnects between your media initiatives and your frontline employees, especially when policy and guidance changes so frequently. It can also tightly align the content on your digital channels with the content agents are sharing with customers.
The solutions can prevent customer runaround by providing insight into three key areas:
- The challenges that impact work-at-home employees’ ability to serve customers
- The visibility managers and supervisors lack to ensure quality, compliance and effectiveness
- The changes needed to support employees and, ultimately, the organisation
In conjunction with knowledge management, workforce management, e-learning and coaching, speech analytics can get the right information into your agents’ hands at the right time. The solutions can provide daily or even hourly updates on any emerging problem areas, providing managers and agents, the information they need to meet new customer needs. The updates can keep everyone in the loop—from C-level execs to marketing and customer experience (CX) teams—on key customer concerns and how your organisation is addressing them.
Speech analytics systems can help you tune other mission-critical systems.
- Do your performance management and quality management tools accurately reflect how agents are handling new customer concerns related to the COVID-19 crisis?
- Are your workforce management algorithms equipped to forecast unexpected calls volumes and build schedules accordingly?
- Do you need to adjust agent KPIs, such as reducing average handle times (AHTs), to address the call overload and allow critical calls to get answered within the appropriate SLAs?
Text analytics for digital interactions
Like speech analytics for voice channels, text analytics can show how customers are responding to digital interactions online such as chat and email. Text analytics tools reveal top customer concerns and how well your digital channels are addressing them. In so doing, they can help ensure that customer interactions across all channels are effective and efficient.
It’s a new day
Your customers will remember the good and the bad from these unprecedented days, including how they were treated by organisations they dealt with, who supported them, who gave them the information they needed to make vital decisions, who responded with empathy and understanding, and who failed them.
Speech and text analytics and the critical and timely insight they provide—can help you be remembered for the right reasons.
Guest Blog by Daniel Ziv of Verint Systems Inc., vice president of speech and text analytics and global product strategy
