5 Ways to Stay Ahead of Your Competition With Speech Analytics

Ashley Unitt of NewVoiceMedia introduces five of the best uses of speech analytics, which will help you to stand out from the crowd.

Despite the growth of live chat and other text-based customer service channels, communicating by phone is often still faster and more effective than typing messages.

When things get complex or emotional, click-to-call technology makes it easier than ever for people to reach out to a business via phone.

For this reason, BIA/Kelsey, a leading strategic advisory firm, predicts mobile calls to businesses will exceed 169 billion per year by 2020.

Speech analytics is one of the fastest-growing contact centre technologies because it allows businesses to transform unstructured audio content into actionable insights.

When used effectively, this means the burgeoning technology can provide a competitive edge for your business in the following five ways.

1. Enhance your agents’ job performance

Speech analytics makes monitoring agent behaviour simple by automatically analysing 100 percent of customer calls.

Managers can get the full picture of whether agents are following scripts, demonstrating compliant behaviours and using best practices. The technology also offers insight into the actions and language of your most successful agents.

In combination, these insights can then be used to improve the quality of pre-employment and on-the-job training.

From creating processes for dealing with problem calls to replicating winning techniques, analysing speech data provides the understanding needed to enhance employee performance and customer service levels in one fell swoop.

2. Reduce the number of customers who switch

Recent research by NewVoiceMedia shows us that businesses are losing $75 billion a year because of poor service. What’s more, this money often leaves the pockets of badly performing companies and goes straight into the hands of a competitor.

In short, if you’re not meeting expectations, customers rarely think twice about going elsewhere.

Speech analytics reveals the reasons why customers call your business. It also offers the capability to scan conversations, spot trends and flag problem calls for deeper analysis.

By identifying your most common problems and frequently made complaints, speech analytics can help you implement changes that prevent your customers from switching before it’s too late.

3. Improve how customers perceive your products and services

If you sell a similar product or service to several close competitors, good customer service can set you apart from the competition. This helps to ensure your business has the policies and procedures needed to evaluate satisfaction levels and is therefore a crucial part of improving the way customers and prospects view your business.

With recent advancements in speech analytics, you can now use the software to analyse stress and emotion in a customer’s voice. This capability reveals what really happens during a call and any underlying issues causing frustration, ensuring you are better equipped to satisfy customer expectations.

4. Find better ways reduce costs

There are also several cost benefits to introducing speech analytics. For example, the software provides data-based insights that allow contact centre managers to create better efficiencies, including increasing first-call resolution rates and reducing unnecessary callbacks.

Overall, reducing the number of repeat callers is the most effective way to lower the average contact centre cost per call and overall operating costs.

5. Know what your customers want before they do

In the digital age, consumers are bombarded with information that often makes it more difficult to find the products or services that best suit their needs.

In these conditions, poorly informed contact centre agents will struggle to deliver the personalised experiences that can boost sales.

Luckily, speech analytics provides an easy and cost-effective solution to learning what customers want — sometimes, before they even know it themselves.

By analysing response rates across key customer demographics and target markets, real-time speech analytics can help sales managers find creative ways to sell more to new and existing customers.

For instance, analysing call data allows managers to identify how customers are responding to different offers and what impact they have on satisfaction levels. This information can then be used to create personalised up-sell and cross-sell suggestions that customers don’t even know they want until they are shown.

Author: Robyn Coppell