With Speech Analytics, transform your contact center into more than just a cost center!

Speech Analytics solutions for contact centers have never been more relevant and efficient than they are today. They enable you to explore, analyze, and monitor a vast number of interactions in order to improve the quality of the customer experience that is delivered and the effectiveness of customer service.

Even though we have entered the age of automation and digital technology, a great number of customers still prefer interacting with a human agent to other means of contacting companies. The telephone channel thus remains the richest medium, where customers feel they can share all their pain points (related to products, services, customer journeys, etc.).

With a well-thought Speech Analytics solution, companies can identify these pain points and take action to improve their products and services, customer journeys, or the way agents handle customer requests.

A comprehensive Speech Analytics solution will enable them to:

• Automatically detect recurring themes (unsupervised analysis),
• Categorize calls (by topic, feeling, and behavior),
• Generate graphs and reports to measure correlations and trends,
• Engage in exploration via targeted listening,
• Analyze the signal (silences, breaks, speaking time distribution).

Speech Analytics: Lowering the cost of contact center services

Nowadays, customer relations departments are being asked to lower the cost of contact center services even more. However, the flow of interactions – especially calls – is only slightly decreasing (if at all) and agents must address an ever-growing number of new channels: messaging, chat, social networks, etc.

How can these two realities be reconciled? The key lies in the ability of contact centers to:

• Optimize the channel mix by digitizing/automating some customer journeys and/or call patterns,
• Eradicate the root cause of calls resulting from poor handling of the customer case by the company and/or its partners,
• Improve first-call resolution,
• Improve call handling

1. Optimize the channel mix by digitizing/automating some customer journeys and/or call patterns

For certain calls, it is legitimate to question whether the intervention of an agent is really necessary. A Speech Analytics solution can identify, measure, and analyze low-value calls (such as short ones). Once these have been identified, it is possible to offer smoother customer journeys.

To avoid these calls, it is possible to:

• Automate their processing (through chatbots, voicebots or callbots),
• Set up or optimize self-care (with self-service solutions such as FAQs),
• Provide better information to the customers, by proactively setting up communication processes (SMS, emailing, etc.),
• Communicate better to really reassure the customer!

As a result, agents are free to focus on value-adding tasks – those that are more complex, those where the customer needs reassurance, or where it will be easier for a human to close a deal.

2. Eradicate the root cause of calls resulting from poor handling of the customer case by the company and/or its partners

To do this, the root causes of customer dissatisfaction must be sought in order to determine whether the company could remedy it.

A good Speech Analytics solution will often bring to light problems in customer case processing such as:

• Communication of a processing or resolution time that the company is unable to meet,
• Invoicing errors or unclear invoices,
• Missed appointments.

This ability to look at the customer journey as a whole, through the prism of customer experience, is also an opportunity for the Customer Relationship Center (CRC) to assert itself not as a cost center, but as a partner to other departments in the company.

3. Improve first-call resolution (FCR)

A well-designed Speech Analytics solution can also measure customer perceived reiteration across all channels, not just the phone channel, identify the most correlated customer requests, and investigate the causes.

As a result of these measures, analysis can be carried out on:

• The inconsistency of prompted answers across channels and/or agents,
• Issues with the tools/processes for qualifying and processing customer requests or the way they are carried out by agents (a request that is misunderstood systematically leading to another call),
• Unkept promises (to call back a customer, give a credit note on the next invoice, etc.).

The introduction of a Speech Analytics solution improves the FCR and translates directly into a better NPS or customer satisfaction.

4. Improve call handling

Finally, a strong Speech Analytics solution allows users to look at calls through the prism of a wide range of indicators. This not only ensures more efficient call handling, but also reduces:

• Average Talk Time (ATT),
• Waiting and silence times,
• The number of calls being forwarded – as not all cases of forwarding may be legitimate or result from anomalies.

Do you want to improve the performance of your contact center with a tool that can transcribe and analyze 100% of your recorded calls to extract invaluable information and highlight the right customer information? Discover Odigo’s Contact Center as a Service solution that integrates Verint Speech Analytics.

This blog was co-authored by Gilles VAROQUIER, Head of Analytics at Odigo, and Thibault GILARDONI, Senior Sales Representative in charge of partner offers at Odigo.