They say silence is golden. They even made a hit song about it. But in call centers, silence can be anything but golden. Extended periods of silence during calls often mean something is seriously amiss. This post explains what silence means for call centers and how to use silence detection to gain some quick wins.
What Silence Is Actually Saying
It’s virtually impossible to avoid all silence during calls. Brief moments where neither the customer nor agents say anything are inevitable. But typically, this type of silence is innocuous. For instance, the agent could be preoccupied with pulling up a customer’s information. It’s when the silence lasts a little too long that managers start seeing red flags.
Extended silences are often due to the agent placing customers on hold for too long, which may indicate agent knowledge gaps or other issues that managers should address. This is where managers could benefit the most from our silence detection feature. Now let’s talk about how to use this feature for some quick wins.
Silence Detection Reveals Trends
How can QA managers determine if silence is a problem in their call centers? First, they need visibility into the trends and outliers in the call transcriptions. For instance, can managers tell if one particular agent or team of agents has a higher percentage of silence on calls than other agents? The most accurate and efficient way to see this is with CallFinder’s silence detection.
This tool quickly identifies the percentage of silence within a call for both the caller and the agent (for call centers with dual channel call recordings). Managers can easily pinpoint calls, or a set of calls, with long durations of silence using CallFinder. Our solution also tells managers how the call began and how it ended with our sentiment analysis and emotion analysis features.
Coach Soft Skills with Silence & Overtalk Detection
While excessive silence during a call is not good, it’s also important to steer clear of too much overtalk. CallFinder’s overtalk detection is the other half of silence detection. Managers can see if the silence is the problem, or if the agent is talking too much. Overtalk often means the agent is not really listening to the caller and their needs. Once the QA manager or coach can determine this, then they can coach the agent on soft skills.
Create Training Tools with Silence Detection
With silence detection, managers can use the findings to develop training techniques focusing on agents’ specific knowledge gaps. There is also potential for subsequent training materials. Plus, managers have the ability to see average silence and overtalk scores for highly ranked agents. They can then use those metrics as goal-setting KPIs for other agents. When it’s clear how one agent succeeds, the rest of the agents are apt to learn from them and succeed as well.
How would you like to see less silence and more successful calls in your call center? Request a demo to learn how CallFinder’s silence detection feature helps reduce those moments, improve agent performance, and enhance the customer experience.
