3 Ways to Improve Customer Experience with Speech Analytics

As companies continue to evolve their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategies to attract and maintain customers, the contact center has emerged as an important strategic asset. The agents staffing these centers have a direct impact on customer acquisition and satisfaction. In order to continue providing excellent service, more companies are turning to advanced analytics to ensure that their contact centers are performing at a high level of efficiency. 
 
In addition, market leaders are using insights from customer interactions to uncover sales, marketing, and operational improvement opportunities that touch every branch of the business. Contact analytics is now being leveraged to mine intelligence from customer interactions and drive continuous process improvement throughout the entire organization.

While there are many ways to leverage insights from speech analytics to improve the customer experience, there are several “easy wins” every company can achieve within a few weeks of going live.

1) Quickly uncover and solve problems that create inefficient calls.

No customer likes to be put on hold for long periods of time while trying to get a problem resolved. Excessive silence on calls could mean any number of things, but with random call sampling, the root cause of the issue may never be found. Almost any speech analytics system has the ability to identify and categorize calls with large blocks of silence. With some basic investigation, the cause of the issue can typically be identified very quickly.

Perhaps it is a technology problem like a slow computer system or an outdated piece of CRM software that is causing the delay.  Or maybe it’s a process issue that is wasting an agent’s time. Sometimes, agents put customers on hold simply because they need a break. Speech analytics is able to uncover these root causes and organizations can take action to prevent them from cropping up again.

2) Find out why customers are unhappy

It’s difficult to improve customer experience if you don’t understand what your customer’s pain points are. Speech analytics can identify all calls containing “dissatisfaction” language or acoustics, including complaints, raised voices, and customer over talk. Segmenting these calls and analyzing common words and phrases around dissatisfaction language can quickly reveal why customers are upset. In addition, the ability to search transcripts for specific words and phrases around dissatisfaction allows companies to close out customer issues in a matter of days, not months. Similar techniques can be used to analyze large spikes in call volume and can often catch problems before they spiral out of control.
 

3) Better target offers

Speech analytics can reveal insights on customer behaviors and purchasing trends for different products. Because data is being gathered from 100% of calls, the information gathered is a much more representative sample of customer tendencies. For example, one company discovered that customers were more likely to pay for an annual support plan for their new smartphone or tablet than they would for a less expensive MP3 player. This knowledge was used by the marketing team to help fine tune advertising strategies and deliver more relevant offers to their customers, which led to increase in warranty upsells.

It’s important to remember that implementing a speech analytics solution will not automatically improve customer experience. Ensuring organizational buy in and building trust in the tool are major factors in realizing quick returns on investment. A strategic plan that highlights priorities and establishes goals, along with open communication across all levels of the organization, promotes credibility and allows for a more fluid adoption of the changes and insights provided by speech analytics.