Yesterday, my family went to Ruggles Mine in New Hampshire, where you can rent a pickaxe and buy a bucket to chip away at the rocks and caves to see what you can collect. Anything you can cut away and carry out, you can keep. As I was there, digging away, I got to thinking that I was doing a very manual version of what companies do every day as they claw their way though an enormous amount of data, that at times may seem insurmountable, much like these cavernous arches and tunnels, in order to find the gems that will help them improve their business’ performance.
This thought process brought me to thinking about our launch last year of a cloud-based speech analytics solution that mines through a company’s call recordings in search of designated keywords and phrases, to help that company find calls containing those keywords and segment them out from the rest.
Why is this helpful? Because, then, rather than having to pickaxe your way through caves and tunnels trying to find the good stuff, you easily can focus in on the rock that holds the gems.
You’re probably asking yourself, how does this relate to Speech Analytics and my business?
When a customer calls your business, and they hear the standard announcement, “This call may be monitored for quality control,” what does that really mean?
The monitoring part is easy; the system simply records the call. The mining part is also easy, if you’re using the right technology. The hard part is actually implementing the quality assurance. Mining calls for specific keywords and phrases, so that you can assure your customer-facing employees are following a script, or that they are using up-sell techniques for example, if like mining for gems – finding a needle in a haystack.
Speech analytics can help you easily and quickly find the important keywords and phrases that you want to monitor, specific to your business. The right technology can do this easily and affordably thanks to cloud-based systems.
Speech analytics is the key.
Your current process might involve the aforesaid troubleshooting or simply random sampling. You definitely want to make sure your customers have a consistently positive and appropriate interaction with your call center, but the sheer number of incoming calls puts your compliance manager in a hit-or-miss situation.
Speech analytics, on the other hand, automates the process and provides a structure where there was once just the white noise of recorded calls. It uses keywords to search, glean and organize calls, and the data it mines is the stuff of pure gold.
Risk management – In the area of diminishing risk and making sure your call center reps follow the book when they speak with customers, speech analytics keys on the essentials:
- Are your reps passing on vital information, disclosures and service caveats?
- What about those sensitive and potentially explosive compliance issues?
Call recording and speech analytics is the most cost-effective and efficient way to ensure your compliance officer’s peace of mind. Another benefit is that when your reps know that their performance is systematically and objectively monitored, they work smarter and more carefully. They know that the monitoring is relentless, impersonal and totally fair.
Small businesses can afford the technology now – This technology has been around for some time, but until recently only the larger companies and government agencies could afford it. Now with recent advances in the software, small businesses can leap onto the increasingly level playing field and reap the benefits of speech analytics.
Find out what else speech analytics can do – Quality control of your call center operation is but one of the many benefits of speech analytics. Contact us and we’ll show you how to leverage our product into effective marketing and cost savings (and other good things) as well.
The next question then is how do you close the gap between monitoring and quality control? Also, once that gap is closed systemically, are you really controlling quality or doing the Orwellian “Big Brother” bit with your employees?
If your current “quality control” is simply after-the-fact troubleshooting with some dissatisfied customer who had a particularly bad experience with one of your reps, the fire may be out, but there may be smoke lurking in terms of negative agent performance and serious compliance issues. Or the agent simply might need more training in dealing with customers.
