Many facets of a business can benefit from mining call data, also known in the anecdotal sense as capturing the ‘voice’ of the customer. But, without the right technology in place, it is not feasible or practical for a business to capture customer interactions in any meaningful, efficient way.
As businesses navigate progressively competitive waters, customer service often arises as the key differentiator, making call recording and speech analytics applications increasingly useful for contact centers, sales and marketing, compliance, and customer service departments to gain and maintain an edge, identify their niche, and hone their operational techniques. One of the latest developments in monitoring customer interactions is speech analytics. This advanced call recording and audio mining technology allows a business to create content searches that automatically monitor customer conversations captured in audio recordings.
These speech mining developments are allowing companies to address and improve many of the challenges that are shared by small to large businesses alike, and are relevant to many different industries.
Here is a quick list of five shared challenges, and how the latest advancements in speech analytics will help companies overcome these challenges to continue to grow and be profitable:
# 1. Customer Satisfaction
In today’s world, customer service is often the main differentiator between two competing companies. Monitoring the actual point of contact between a customer and an agent during a phone conversation proves to be challenging and time consuming if there is not automated monitoring technology in place. A company cannot have happy customers without delivering quality service and having well-trained and knowledgeable agents.
The front line with customers is where a cost-effective speech analytics solution can help companies address customer service quality within their organizations, while simultaneously providing the data that is necessary to build better tools and training programs for their agents.
With recording and speech analytics working in real time to monitor calls for quality customer service and satisfaction, companies can:
- Track positive or negative performance of agents.
- Ensure agents are compliant while speaking with customers.
- Optimize quality monitoring.
- Identify agents or areas of process that need monitoring and further training.
- Identify process issues and knowledge gaps in various business units.
- Empower and engage agents with knowledge and training, and increase agent retention.
Increased agent knowledge and productivity will build a company’s service reputation, generate more sales and decrease costs.
# 2. Internal Processes and Cost Saving Opportunities
Categorizing calls using speech analytics to identify call type (based on search definitions and key phrases) will help a business improve efficiencies. High volume, long duration and repeat calls will give indications of where an organization may be able to reduce average call handling times, reduce the wrap-up time spent during a customer service conversation, and identify any causes for long duration calls that can be addressed to save agent time and the company money.
Having efficient processes in place to respond to certain calls, either with customer interaction and follow up, or by internal process change, will improve business operations overall, thereby reducing costs.
# 3. Collect Competitive and Market Intelligence
Not only can a speech analytics system provide knowledge on a business, it is also a powerful tool to capture the latest promotions, strategies and messages that top competitors are pushing. Having this knowledge empowers a company to adjust campaigns, strategies and tactics to overcome the threat of competition.
# 4. Measure Marketing Effectiveness
By listening to the voices of the customers, businesses gain a wealth of knowledge to better understand their position in the market, and also understand customer preferences. With speech analytics, searches can track the performances of marketing campaigns, promotions and key messages. Calls can be categorized not only by business unit, but also get as granular as specific products and services, brands, marketing campaigns and competitor mentions.
Speech analytics can help a marketing department and its respective agency partners:
- measure campaign effectiveness based on direct customer feedback,
- measure brand awareness,
- identify successful promotions
- and home in on customer preferences.
All of this data and knowledge will improve the effectiveness of the marketing and in turn, grow the business.
# 5. Ensure Script Compliance
“Compliance” means the customer service center or contact center, its employees, and each interaction with customers conforms to a clearly defined script, policy, standard or law. Failure on the part of customer agents to follow a mandatory script or business process leads to issues with customer satisfaction and efficiency, and could put your business at risk if you operate in a regulated world. Disregarding a single non-compliant event on just one call with a customer can lead to expensive litigation and the loss of a customer’s trust.
Searches within a speech analytics application for keywords and phrases from the script helps pinpoint non-compliant calls and offending agents, and provides a jump on risk mitigation and the development of improved training programs to ensure one hundred percent (100%) compliance.
Conclusion
Without implementing a call monitoring service, businesses cannot effectively or efficiently mine audio recordings of customer interactions to extract key data. It takes time and resources to listen to call recordings and identify those that need your attention. Speech analytics is the process of analyzing recorded calls to glean business intelligence that helps improve operations within the sales and customer service departments of a company. When in place, this powerful technology brings structure to customer interactions and sheds light on business intelligence contained in telephone interactions that is otherwise only accessible by listening to entire call recordings of each call.
Overall, speech analytics software extends the opportunities to gather the data necessary to close the knowledge gaps within a company. The extent of business intelligence that becomes available once call recording with speech analytics is in place will improve operational efficiency, enhance the customer experience, improve the bottom line, and play a key role in keeping a company on a course of growth.
Images: ”Neuromarketing /Shutterstock.com“
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