COVID-19 has been an unexpected event that has caused significant impact on contact centres across the country.
We have all had to transition our business models to accommodate the impact on customer experience, and more importantly the health and safety of our customers and co-workers.
How Speech Analytics Supports this change
One way to help support this transition is through the use of Speech Analytics. This technology allows you to listen to both your customers and agents in this time of adversity, which is invaluable in CX.
One thing to be wary of in uncertain situations such as this, is that customers want to talk to people more, so be ready for an increase in telephone activity.
Your customers can find themselves facing all sorts of new challenges, whether they are linked to vulnerability, changes in financial circumstances or employment status. or Customers may even call just to try and gain some clarity about the status of their account, or for guidance on what they can or should do at a time like this.
The insights derived from Speech Analytics can prove vital in understanding how your business is doing, from both a positive and a negative standpoint.
Most businesses want to understand what they are doing well so that they can maintain a high level of satisfaction in customers, but they also want to know what they could do better to reduce attrition and increase loyalty.
Speech Analytics can provide contact centre professionals with a rich source of pure, unedited data.
Understanding your customers
Both the pandemic and the management of it have been hard to deal with for most businesses, namely because of how suddenly the situation can change or develop.
Few contact centre teams had the time to write new scripts for their agents or otherwise prepare themselves for the oncoming spike in customer queries.
But the data derived from conversations using Speech Analytics can provide raw insight into what and how things are being said on a daily basis. So if you want a true reflection of how customers may feel or act with regards to their situation, Speech Analytics will provide you with the clearest insights to interpret, which you can then respond to with appropriate changes to your operations.
Using Speech Analytics to understand true CX
Customer experience is usually measured through NPS or surveys. The problem with these however, is that they are very much dependent on if and when a customer actually completes them.
Can you be sure your customers will always provide you with answers after their phone conversation?
Not every customer will provide you with the data you need to truly understand how your agents and business are operating.
Speech Analytics however is run against 100% of your calls, which allows you to tap into each and every call for exclusive customer experience content and insight.
Conversational data is made available almost as soon as the call has ended, which is essential for root cause analysis as it provides clear outputs for effective change.
Behavioural Analytics
Something to consider when tapping into your call data is not just spoken words that follow the process guidelines, but the behavioural side of conversations.
How an agent responds to a customer can easily impact their overall experience, and you have to be able to trust your agents to be a representative voice of your business at all times.
Speech Analytics uses out of the box categories around behaviours that can provide agents with prepared responses when confronted with particularly difficult calls or topics.
Unearth Hidden Insights
The data you require for CX insight is probably already sitting in your contact centre database just waiting to be analysed. If you don’t already have Speech Analytics, you could be missing out on some important insights that, if acted upon, could help reshape your business performance during these times.
Most businesses simply look at their NPS or customer survey results to obtain clarity on their level of CX. But, by relying solely on them, you could be unintentionally leading customers towards specific responses based on how you have phrased each question.
Not only that, but what happens when a customer doesn’t understand the question itself? Do they select the answer that they think is most appropriate to how they are feeling? Or do they actually skip that question entirely? Either of the options doesn’t provide you with the most truthful representation of your customer base, meaning the information derived from their answers is likely to be incomplete or inaccurate.
Speech Analytics is an accurate way of understanding your customer's satisfaction (or lack thereof). The conversations that are recorded provide a clear and unbiased representation of the voice of your customers.
So how do we turn these conversations into insights?
The audio recorded from your calls is mined through the Speech Analytics engine and relayed into transcriptions of text.
By incorporating available metadata such as agent name, department, brand/product and disposition etc., you can target certain areas of your business, or even create pandemic-themed categories to isolate those affected calls.
By running searches using these categories, the available metadata can provide you with clear insight into those areas most impacted. This data is made available in seconds and provides an overall view of the contact centre activity within a few clicks.
Pandemic-themed hits are easily identifiable and displayed with overall call volume and proportion split, along with other hard data such as average handle time to understand how the situation has impacted efficiencies.
Scorecard Reporting
Because Speech Analytics works in the realm of what and how things are said, agent effectiveness indicators can always be identified through silence blocks or hold times as well.
Managers and QA will likely be monitoring performance based metrics such as AHT, adherence to process and responses to customer queries.
With Speech Analytics, you can monitor all of that and more, right down to behavioural metrics such as empathy, politeness and ownership.
These types of attributes can be aggregated into a scorecard so your managers and even agents themselves can see how customers perceive them on calls. These scorecards can be easily modified and maintained, and even linked in with agent training programs.
The data that is displayed can also be subdivided by categories such as department level or agent level, with hyperlinks to each individual call level to identify risk areas.
The available metadata can also be utilised in these scorecards as filterable metrics, meaning specific call types or brands can be isolated. For instance, if you complete a search and find that one disposition is affected more than others, you can build a scorecard that targets that specific disposition for more in-depth research.
Proactive Management
Applying the features outlined above to the pandemic, you could identify calls in the early phases of the virus outbreak, where there was a lot of uncertainty about the extent of the situation. Agents on these calls may have not been so empathetic due to the lack of clarity, and therefore will have had a lesser understanding of how it impacted individual customers.
The insight derived from these calls could provide a clear direction of what you could do moving forward to provide a better customer experience.
One thing to be mindful of however is how this is rolled out and trained, as other metrics can be impacted by over emphasis on certain behaviours. Things like an increase in AHT due to overloading the customer with empathy could also impact the overall outcome of the call from a positive perspective to a negative.
Another advantage of Speech Analytics is that it can allow you to link the specific responses of feedback to the actual interaction.
You can then identify triggers that generate specific outcomes, allowing you to understand and overturn through proactive analysis and insight.
Have you ever wanted to reach out to a customer because they indicated on a call that they wanted to leave your business before taking the opportunity to provide a survey response?
Thanks to specific categorisation of churn language and indicators of negative experience, Speech technology can prevent this from being a problem.
Dissatisfaction alone is not enough to determine a customer's intentions, but together with empathy, ownership and elements of churn, you can pinpoint the parts of the call which contextualise the reason behind their decision. This puts you on the front foot as you can group up these customer comments into more categories and understand if multiple customers are having the same experience, before putting measures in place to change that.
Hot Topic Detection
One way to stay ahead of the curve is to utilise the feature of Speech Analytics that identifies hot conversation topics.
This feature allows you to search specific date ranges such as yesterday, last week, last month or even month to date before having the volume of topics displayed to you in one visual snapshot.
This can be used so that you are not caught off guard by emerging customer issues, and you can be prepared for future conversations on the same narrative.
Key Learnings
Change is never easy, but having data provide building blocks to support such change is advantageous. Especially data that provides the size of the issue with volumes and frequency of topical conversations.
Speech Analytics provides data that commands action. It provides a system that allows users to share findings, call snippets and evaluations to educate the contact centre on isolated and unforeseen issues.
By utilising Speech technology, you can maintain company standards and values, support customers through difficult times, and empower your agents with newfound depth of insight into customer behaviours.
Book a meeting with us below to get a hands-on demo of our solutions and a free copy of this whitepaper examining how Contact Centres like yours can use Speech Analytics technologies to ensure that even through particularly volatile periods, your CX practices can remain as effective as possible.
