Look who’s talking!

The value of the information captured in call recordings is unparalleled and has been long understood by those in charge of contact centers. However the sheer volume of calls and manual processes required to extract information from call recordings often reduces the Voice-of-the-Customer (VoC) to a mere whisper.

The recent advent of speech analytics technologies has suddenly caused a great deal of attention to be diverted to the customer voice, increasing the accessibility of this information for uses beyond quality monitoring. Many contact centers are now leveraging speech analytics to help them identify important information such as drivers of long average handle times (AHT), repeat calls, customer satisfaction, and call volume amongst others.

The primary driving force behind organizations purchasing the product are as follows-reducing costs in the contact center, creating back-office efficiencies, and/or understanding the customer experience. As speech technology continues to evolve, organizations are expanding their speech analytics initiatives to create value across various departments.

Early ‘directed' technologies restricted organizations to getting answers only to the questions asked-focusing on the ‘categories' of issues they already knew about. Today speech analytics not only provides ‘categorical' insights, but it can also capitalize on the vast repository of unsolicited and unfiltered customer feedback in recorded calls.

It provides a window into what customers are talking about-without predisposition towards an assumed outcome-effectively letting organizations know what they don't already know. Speech analytics can uncover issues that affect sales, marketing, operations, compliance, support as well as customers, partners, and employees. And the migration of this tool from the contact center to throughout the enterprise is reflected in the growing speech technology market. In fact, analysts predict speech analytics growth rates of ‘25% in 2013 and 20% in 2014'.

Let's take a look at the areas within an organization that can benefit from speech analytics.

Account Management

Forward-thinking enterprises are leveraging the voice of their customers not only to create process efficiencies that reduce costs, but also to drive revenues.

For example, a national payment processing company used speech analytics to tap into the calls of customers who had closed their accounts to build out a profile of a customer likely to defect. The analytics team then leveraged the tool to search through incoming calls to flag existing customers who fit in that profile. After cross-correlating the list of retention risks with CRM data, the team established a process to proactively contact the most high-value and ‘at risk' customers, saving more than 600 accounts worth `10 crores.

In the first 7 weeks of launching the solution, the company had already achieved a return on its speech analytics technology investment.

Sales

For many enterprises, cross or upselling to customers is as important as retaining them. One leading financial institution analyzed the conversations taking place in its contact center to understand why a ‘service to sales' initiative wasn't meeting targets. By using speech analytics to help mine and analyze trends across the customer interactions, it quickly identified that certain terms and phrases in a script that were provided by the marketing team correlated with much lower conversion rates.

When using the phrase ‘may we have another moment of your time' to transition from the service segment of the call to the sales pitch, conversion rates dropped from an average of 15.1% to 6.3%. Simply by using a different phrase to transition, some agents managed to more than double the average conversion rate. Leveraging speech analytics helped uncover which components in the sales initiative weren't working in time to benefit from fine-tuning the program.

Partner Management

Many of the calls into the contact center are driven by processes or issues over which it has no control such as:billing issues, missing orders, and broken products. These issues can even be more difficult to resolve when the source is external to the enterprise. One travel company discovered that many of the calls it received in the contact center were driven by a third-party's billing department. This discovery led the company to work with the third party to improve its billing practices and reduce call volume.

Marketing and Advertising

Another area that can benefit from the customer recordings within the contact center is the marketing department. Buried within customer calls is information on brand perception, messages that work, issues that can blow up into social media nightmares, and insight that marketing can leverage in future campaigns-an on-demand focus group. In addition to these proactive uses for speech analytics, the marketing department can also leverage it for times when messaging needs re-tuning or modification.

One large organization was able to fix an issue in an advertising campaign based upon information gathered in the contact center. The contact center was receiving calls where customers were frustrated and confused by a particular television campaign. By analyzing the calls, it was determined that the voice-over describing the offer did not match the screen text. The voice-over indicated the offer had no restrictions, while the graphics indicated it was limited to certain types of customers. Once the issue was addressed, conversion rates increased and customer frustration was alleviated.

Today speech analytics technology has made it easier than ever to identify and surface issues that can drive change not only in the contact center, but across the organization and its business as a whole. Enterprises that have found innovative ways to turn up the volume on their voice of the customer initiatives have been able to balance the needs of their customers and their business objectives. These enterprises have been able to optimize the business as they improve their customer experience.