Supercharge With Real-time Speech Analytics

Alex Martinez at OpenText explains how to supercharge your contact centre with real-time speech analytics.

Customer satisfaction, more than ever, has become a key metric for measuring business success. The quality of your products and level of support are paramount. And in today’s market conditions, there is no margin for error—companies simply cannot afford to lose a customer.

Your customers will be loyal and will continue to buy from you only if they perceive you as being honest, transparent and knowledgeable about the products and services you sell and support.

These qualities—honesty, transparency and knowledge—are vital attributes for your contact centre agents, whether they are working from the office or from home. When agents lack the relevant customer information and product knowledge, they might be compelled to improvise and deviate from their script or factual data.

This is because they are under tremendous pressure to provide an immediate response to customers—whether it’s someone upset about the quality of the product they have purchased or someone who’s been misinformed or hasn’t received the kind of service they expected.

Agents in general will know when they are not being transparent, forthcoming or compliant. Undoubtedly, this will negatively affect overall customer experience and customers’ opinions about your organization. And it can lead to increased churn, a real threat to your bottom line.

Maintaining high-quality products and services is a constant challenge. By adopting innovative technologies, your organization can drive customer experiences to the highest standards of excellence. This is where innovative technologies such as real-time speech analytics can tip the balance in your favour.

What Real-Time Speech Analytics Can Do

When it was first introduced, speech recognition and analytics technology was far too immature to be embraced by the contact centre industry. Today, though, things are quite different, as the technology has significantly matured. Real-time speech analytics can fundamentally supercharge your agents to provide top-notch customer support and help them overcome the many challenges they face.

Real-time speech analytics technology lets companies analyse phone conversations between agents and customers to gain insightful intelligence from those calls. This information helps you gain new insights into your products, agents’ adherence to call handling processes, operational issues and contact centre agent performance.

A fully encompassing real-time speech analytics solution can provide you with capabilities like voice recording or integration to voice recording systems, as well as speech to text transcriptions, diarization, sentiment analysis, conversational trends and analysis of themes or categories.

It can also automatically identify areas in which contact centre agents might need additional training or coaching and can monitor the level of customer service provided on calls.

Used with a dashboard interface, speech analytics applications can provide insightful analysis on sentiment, trends and tone of post-processed, transcribed voice recordings. And with real-time speech analytics, organizations can get live insights while the agent is still on the phone with the customer.

A Variety of Potential Use-Cases

Such capabilities make contact centres exponentially more effective at handling customer product issues and sales inquiries. And they enhance the overall customer experience.

Organizations that adopt real-time speech analytics technology can reap many benefits—for example, by identifying spoken keywords or phrases during agent/customer conversations. Some fundamental use cases include:

• Automating agent tasks for assisted data entry
• Procuring next agent action
• Highlighting keywords that can be used to trigger live agent coaching or manager alerts and intervention
• Providing real-time cues and sentiment analysis
• Summarizing calls/incidents

Real-time speech analytics is the ideal tool for organizations that want to react immediately to issues and opportunities in the contact centre. It allows agents to deliver high quality support with decisiveness and personalization throughout every call.

Most of all, it enables your agents to provide a first-call resolution with a high degree of confidence. In essence, the agent has a technology companion or virtual mentor that is listening to the conversation and providing guidance in the context of the information being exchanged in real time.

For businesses, real-time speech analytics enables more efficient contact centres, reduces employee and customer churn rates and increases sales. And it helps companies establish stronger brands, with more loyal customers and enhanced customer experiences.

Author: Guest Author