Speech analytics does exactly as it suggests – analyses speech. In practice, this often means transcribing spoken word into text and using case-specific automated tagging to identify words and phrases within the conversation. Case specific tagging is when a bespoke dictionary of words and phrases are applied to the transcription to identify when and if the words and phrases are used. Being able to highlight these words and phrases allows users to draw insight from 100% of their interactions with consumers across all media channels. As a result, speech analytics has several useful applications in helping to build better performing consumer facing teams across both regulated and unregulated industries.
The overall impact of speech analytics on organisations and more specifically teams that choose to use it will be a much improved learning and development process. Learning and development will be improved in both its effectiveness in improving agent performance, and the efficiency, or time taken, to implement these processes. These boosts in efficiency and effectiveness will primarily be driven by 4 key factors:
Improved Identification of areas of agent weakness
Speech analytics can provide 100% coverage across all agent-consumer interactions and provide insight into metrics such as hold times, silences and interruptions, all of which can help to determine an agent’s performance in a specific call or across a range of calls. What is more, by training the speech analytics tool with specific data, the sentiment of calls (happy, sad, anxious etc.) can be derived to determine both if the customer “enjoyed” the call and whether the agent handles these differing customers well. It is currently common to see agents assessed purely on whether the call went well or badly. The flaw with this method is that even if an agent handles an angry, aggressive or upset customer well they may still be seen as having had a bad call as the post call survey filled in by the customer is biased towards the feelings of the customer, not the actions of the agent.
Speech analytics clearly provides value to these situations as it helps both agents and supervisors understand true areas of strength and weakness, rather than assumptions and biases about them. This helps build better teams in a manner of ways, namely contact centres can agent-call match so as to have the right agents on the right calls but also address agent’s specific areas of weakness as will be discussed below.
Data driven training programs
As a result of the above, agent training and development programs can be produced that are supported by the findings of the speech analytics software. Supervisors no longer have to guess based on limited data where an agent’s areas of weakness might be. Instead it provides a data driven basis for supervisors to produce training programs that address specific areas of performance weakness. Moreover, L&D and training teams can create more informative on-boarding/training processes that are based on historic areas of weakness for all new agents across the board. This means incumbent agents will improve performance and new recruits can hit the ground running, making a genuine positive impact on the team’s performance from day one.
Unrivalled Insight Into Customer Need
Speech analytics can provide users with customer specific experience data that is derived from the language used in the interaction. As a result there will no longer be a need for post call surveys which provide limited insight and often are not filled in at all. The benefits to the teams performance is two-fold, by understanding the voice of the customer, products and services can be tailored to best meet the needs of the customer and it aids teams in determining the next steps of the sales process. Both of these outcomes limit customer churn and enable agents to optimise sales opportunities.
Greater transparency between supervisor and agent
Speech analytics can provide all the benefits mentioned above across every platform and for every interaction. The opportunity to have 100% coverage means transparency between supervisor and agent is crystal clear. Clear lines of communication between agent and supervisor about performance gives supervisors a chance to manage their team as effectively as possible – getting the right people in the right place to best handle issues, improving workforce morale and ultimately better team performance.
Boosted QA efficiency
Aside from learning and development improvements there is one other area in which speech analytics can help to build better team performance. Improved Quality Assurance (QA) efficiency.
Current QA methods are labour intensive and rely on a team of advisors to listen to hours of calls to determine best practices for agents, develop training programs and identify potentially systemic issues within agents’ sales practices. As mentioned, speech analytics provides the opportunity to have 100% coverage of all customer interactions and with the help of bespoke designs can help boost QA efficiency by highlighting the most informative calls of either a positive or negative nature. This means customer experience and agent performance QA can be handled much more effectively and efficiently, freeing up time to work on the matters that are most important to the business.
To learn more about how speech analytics can improve your customer service experience, visit Aveni Detect
