In today’s highly competitive market, providing quality customer service is critical to a company’s success. One way to ensure high levels of customer service is to employ speech analytics (and speech analytics best practices) to quickly locate key words and phrases within call recordings. This will allow your organization to identify opportunities for leveraging business intelligence, reducing risk and improving operational efficiencies like increasing first call resolution (FCR) and lowering average handle time (AHT).
Many organizations understand that there is value in implementing a speech analytics solution, but struggle with defining best practices and objectives associated with an effective program.
Speech Analytics Best Practices:
- Identify key words and phrases that matter.
Your organization is unique. Make sure you define the key words and phrases that make the most sense for your organization and align with your business goals. Remember to include names of competitors, phrases indicative of decreased customer satisfaction (such as “I want to cancel,” “speak to your supervisor” or “frustrated”) and other service-level KPIs. If needed, fine-tune the software to recognize non-standard words such as jargon, slang and foreign words. Also, be sure to include other departments in the process, as they will be able to provide additional insight into the words and phrases important to other areas of the organization.
- Share the knowledge.
One of the benefits of speech analytics is that it allows you to extend the business intelligence gathered within your contact center throughout the entire organization. In effect, this means tearing down the virtual wall between the call center and other areas of the organization, and allowing the knowledge gained during customer contacts to be shared cross-departmentally (think sales, marketing, collections, fraud and other departments). Historically, this information may have been lost or communicated less effectively as agents are pressured to move on to the next call in queue.
- Coach and train your agents.
Use the key word/phrase mining and silence detection capabilities in your speech analytics software to improve processes and identify agent coaching or up-training opportunities by understanding trends and underlying issues. For example, extended pauses by the agent could indicate a need for additional product training.
- Mine all of your calls, not just some of them.
By mining 100 percent of your calls, you will be able to pinpoint the occurrence of those critical key words and phrases to give you a better (and more accurate) frame of reference while enabling a full view of corporate insight. This is particularly important when monitoring for uncommon, yet critically important phrases that may be missed when only a subset of calls is mined.
- Listen to your customers.
Your customers give you information with every call. An effective speech analytics solution allows your organization to zero in on the critical pieces of information, and extract meaningful data without wasting time or resources on the less significant segments. Analyzing and understanding this data allows you to makes actionable business decisions based on the wants and needs of your customer base.
Ultimately, speech analytics best practices can help your organization improve customer satisfaction through agent coaching and up-training opportunities, improved process adherence, trend and key word /phrase identification and extendible business information. Applying speech analytics best practices to your organization will allow you to better understand your customers by providing you with valuable insight, and the tools needed to turn that insight into critical business intelligence.
