Today’s world is all about digitalization, omnichannel presence, and instant access to information.
As a result, customers have turned into somewhat impatient human beings who expect immediate responses to their questions, seamless self-service options, and 24/7 availability of businesses’ communication channels.
These elevated expectations make the balancing of customer experiences over multiple channels an increasingly challenging task for businesses and organizations.
One of the especially high-pressured channels is communication over the phone. Unlike the touch-based visual experience provided by smartphones, customers interacting over a voice channel must rely solely on spoken communication that often results in lengthy conversations and moments of frustration.
Fortunately, with the latest advancements in speech analytics technology, businesses can offer intuitive customer experiences, even over the phone and other voice-powered interactions.
Speech Analytics Capabilities
Even though speech analytics has been around for some time, it has experienced massive improvements in recent years.
Businesses can now utilize speech analytics to uncover a wide range of useful insights from the spoken interaction between a customer and a call center’s agent (or a voice bot) and finetune business processes to meet customer expectations.
Typically, speech analytics is based primarily on the speech transcription technology that analyzes the spoken conversation’s context. However, modern speech analytics do not stop there. It is equally valuable to be able to recognize the language of the conversation, detect silent spots and cross-talks, and estimate the age group and gender of a caller based on their voice (leveraging the voice biometrics aspect of every spoken conversation).
Used together, these cutting-edge insights enable businesses to perform powerful real-time improvements to customer experiences as well as gather all necessary inputs for efficient adjustments to internal processes.
Business Benefits of Speech Analytics
Companies that interact with customers over the phone (and any other voice channel) can find many notable benefits in speech analytics. These benefits can be explored from various angles as they impact the business on multiple levels.
Automation of Routine Tasks
Routine tasks, such as the categorization of calls, are often viewed by call center agents as a time-consuming activity that is best avoided. With speech analytics, such tasks can be performed automatically based on the context of a call (e.g., the automatic categorization of calls).
More Enthusiastic Agents
The elimination of boring tasks via automation improves the mood of call center agents as they can focus on creative challenges instead of routine tasks. This makes agents much more enthusiastic when communicating with customers over the phone, positively influencing the customer experience.
Better Handling of Emergency Situations
Speech analytics can detect specific keywords appearing in calls automatically and sound the alarm when selected keywords (outage, blackout, water leak, crash, etc.) begin suddenly appearing in calls too frequently. This enables organizations to detect unprecedented situations faster and handle them better.
Comprehensive Coaching of Agents
Everyone has good and not so good days. Therefore, it is important to evaluate agents’ performance based on as many calls with customers as possible. Speech analytics can automatically analyze each agent’s conversation for silent spots, cross-talks, script alignment, and other metrics to provide a fair and comprehensive assessment of their skills to their supervisors.
Easier Up-Selling and Cross-Selling
Real-time speech analytics can also help with personalized customer offers. Call center agents can receive notifications on their screens based on the context of an ongoing conversation to help them identify cross-selling and up-selling opportunities more easily and suggest hard-to-resist offers.
Better NPS and CSAT Scores
Enthusiastic agents who respond to customers’ challenges with meaningful solutions are what customers want. This directly affects the key customer experience indicators such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and the Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score, both of which improve.
Data-Driven Business Decisions
Better context means better decisions. Therefore, as speech analytics provides highly sophisticated insights uncovered from the entire call base, businesses can draw data-based decisions and measures that have an impactful and long-lasting effect on the company’s success.
Cost Savings
The time saved by the automation of routine tasks, automatic detection of up-selling and cross-selling opportunities, and perfected skills of contact center agents via comprehensive coaching lowers the company’s costs and improves revenues.
Speech Analytics Perfects the Customer Experience Over the Phone
Customer expectations are growing every day. It is, therefore, vitally essential for organizations to care about the customer experiences provided over the phone and perfect them via cutting-edge speech analytics. This approach will pay back in the form of greater customer satisfaction, lowered costs, reduced employee churn, and increased revenue.
Michal Hrabí is CEO at Phonexia, the leading company in voice biometrics and speech recognition solutions.
