Applying speech analytics in the contact center provides a myriad of benefits, both on the business side, as well as the customer side. For businesses, the voice monitoring power of speech analytics delivers real-time insights on voice conversations with customers. The voice capture and analysis of conversations enables businesses to digest and focus on where they can improve the customer experience, delivering better service, products, and building the valuable customer relationship.
Agents are already working one of the most stressful jobs in the market today, and often have to deal daily with irate customers and redundant questions and complaints. Yet in spite of these frustrations, contact center agents still strive to do the best possible job they can, and their supervisors or managers can offer a great deal of assistance in this area.
However, giving agents feedback can be a delicate situation to navigate. While tools like call monitoring can be very useful in seeing where agents may need to improve and how they can better serve their callers, listening to every phone conversation in a center with high inbound call volume can be both time consuming and inefficient. Also, some agents view monitoring as a way to micromanage, and can perceive it as invasive. Fortunately, contact center tools like speech analytics offer a better way to implement call monitoring and quality assurance programs so agent training is both effective and appreciated.
Here’s just a few of the benefits of adding a speech analytics solution into your call center technology mix:
Improved Problem Solving Using Speech Analytics
Far too often, many contact center agents find themselves answering the same questions or handling the same crises over and over again. Contact centers may even find themselves receiving a high number of repeat calls. But agents really want to help the customer, and if they find themselves having to deal with a similar dilemma more than once, with no clear plan on how to address it now or in the future, it can be demoralizing for the agent and irritating for the customer.
With speech analytics, contact centers can scan incoming calls far more easily and quickly than standard call monitoring. By searching for specific words and phrases, speech analytics can detect common queries and complaints that may arise, and managers and agents can work together to figure out the best possible solution. Agents will find themselves better equipped to handle specific types of calls when they come in, resolving the problems both quickly and effectively, and freeing the agents to answer more calls and assist more customers.
Insights Make Agents Feel Empowered, Not Attacked
As stated before, contact center agents can look upon call monitoring as less of a helpful tool in their professional growth, and more “Big Brother is watching”. And real-time call recording and monitoring may not be the most effective way to provide feedback for call handling if it takes forever to listen to and identify any problem areas. By the time it is even addressed with the agent, who knows how long it will have been (or how many more times the agent has made the error)? This can lead the agent to have a bitter feeling of “Why are you telling me I’ve been doing this wrong now?”
But when contact centers utilize speech analytics, they can much more quickly identify where agents may need additional training. More importantly, speech analytics allows supervisors to provide solid examples and evidence of customer interactions to agents in a timely manner. With a particular phone conversation much fresher in their minds, agents see the feedback about said conversation as far less abstract, and they are better able to understand where they can improve. Consistent feedback via speech analytics feels more professional, and helps the agents understand their supervisor wants them to succeed. They stop feeling like they are simply being criticized, and start believing in themselves and their abilities.
Agents are the heart, soul, and backbone of any contact center. It is imperative they are performing their duties to their utmost abilities. The more time spent on investing in the right tools and training for agents, the more benefits will be yielded in both service and sales. Speech analytics brings out the best in contact center agents, and those results are then passed on to the customer, and this means everyone wins.
