Speech Analytics: Mining Your Interactions for Customer Service Gold

On one of my visits to Colorado I took a try at panning for gold. I can tell you it’s a lot of work for little (or none in my case) payback. You can see a much more efficient and effective way of mining for gold in the Discovery cable series Gold Rush. For those of you not familiar with the show, the best way I can think of to describe how they do it is gold panning on steroids!

Gold mining makes a great analogy to the benefits that speech analytics provides for a customer service organization. Without speech analytics, contact centers have to put in a lot of effort with limited potential for payback when searching for ways to improve. Panning for gold is basically the contact center equivalent of quality assurance. Speech analytics, on the other hand, parallels the way those Alaskan miners featured on Gold Rush go about it.

Speech analytics lets an organization “listen” to every call and discover loads of customer service gold nuggets. It helps you understand, in detail, what makes your customers beam with delight, or grimace with frustration. Additionally, it can reveal specific instances where an employee may be treading on thin ice with regulatory compliance.

The potential business benefits speech analytics offers the contact center are virtually unlimited. Some leading use-cases include:

Customer Experience – increase positive interactions and reduce negative ones by understanding what makes customers happy, or causes frustration, by pinpointing interactions for investigation with sentiment analysis and topic detection

Agent Performance – improve coaching effectiveness and reduce the time supervisors spend identifying good coaching opportunities by detecting interactions with desired and undesired agent behaviors for recognition and correction

Quality Management – improve QM effectiveness and reduce the time staff spends finding good interactions by identifying high-value interactions for evaluation that mirror key business priorities (as opposed to random selection)

Compliance – mitigate exposure to non-compliance consequences by recognizing interactions where agents did not follow standard policies and procedures

Revenue Generation – enhance revenue by determining where up-sell/cross-sell opportunities were missed and share best practice examples from successful interactions

In future blog posts, I’ll take a deeper look at each of the above areas so you can begin thinking about refining your own efforts at mining for gold. Until then, explore the NICE CXone blog to learn more about how speech analytics is Changing the Game for Contact Center Technology.