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Recent research found that 75% of customers will spend more to buy from a company that offers a good customer experience (CX). Another study found that nearly half of consumers would ditch a brand for a competitor due to poor CX.
We already know that customers who are happy with the experience you provide will spend more with your business, forgive your occasional mistakes and recommend your products and services to others.
In other words, good CX is a huge win for your business. The only question is, how do you know if your customers rate their experience as highly as you hope they do?
Do you know your customers?
The problem is, many customers lie. OK, that’s a bit harsh. They don’t necessarily lie, but they’re sometimes economical with the truth.
You might call it good old British reserve. If we’re unhappy with the service we receive, many of us won’t voice our dissatisfaction, whether to a waitress in a restaurant or to a contact centre agent over the phone.
Instead, we’ll quietly vow never to use that business again, or cancel our service at the first opportunity. Quite often, an organisation will only know that a customer has an issue when it’s too late to do anything about it.
There’s nothing calculated or underhand in any of that. Customers might simply feel uncomfortable bringing up problems during a call (or in front of a restaurant full of people), or might want to avoid a prolonged interaction.
Whatever it is, it’s a huge problem for businesses. If customers won’t be open about their dissatisfaction when they talk to your contact centre, how do your agents remedy the situation and retain their business?
The power of speech analytics in your contact centre
One solution to the problem of reticent customers is speech analytics. You’ve probably come across hype around speech analytics before – the technology has been around for nearly two decades. The difference today is that it actually works.
The industry certainly seems to think so too. One recent study estimated that the market for speech analytics will grow at a CAGR of 22.14% over the next five years. And we believe its popularity is entirely justified.
What is speech analytics and how does it work?
Speech analytics automates the process of listening to contact centre interactions by analysing speech data for valuable information about agent performance and customer emotion.
How does it do that? Well, for a start, speech analytics can identify meaningful words and phrases that have positive and negative connotations. Customers don’t have to be outspoken about their view of your service to offer verbal clues as to how they really feel. Speech analytics can detect the subtle messages hidden in otherwise mundane conversations.
A good, modern speech analytics package can determine the emotional character of a passage of speech (for example, is the speaker happy, neutral, frustrated or displeased?), based on both the words spoken and speech characteristics like intonation, pitch, articulation, speech rate and so on.
It can also measure productivity measures like time on hold and periods of silence that not only give clues to agent performance but also point to more or less satisfied customers.
How can speech analytics improve your contact centre?
By analysing every conversation your agents have, speech analytics software can help you significantly improve contact centre performance. It’s useful in lots of practical, actionable ways including;
- Reduce customer churn
- Alert you to customer frustration or dissatisfaction with your products or service.
- Identify unhappy customers before they walk away.
- Perfect agent coaching
- Identify high and low performing agents.
- Spot the strengths and weaknesses that differentiate them.
- Identify training opportunities.
- Improve agent experience
- Reward high achieving employees.
- Shorten learning cycles and more satisfied agents.
- Agents can monitor their strengths and weaknesses and learn what a great customer interaction looks like.
- Ensure compliance & QA
- Ensure your contact centre interactions are both compliant and follow agreed company policy around upselling and complaints.
- Managers get alerted to compliance issues.
- Real-time analysis (alongside post-call analysis) can prompt agents to read the relevant scripts while the call is taking place.
6 practical use cases of speech analytics in your contact centre
You can leverage this powerful analytics tool to gain insights that will improve the customer experience, employee engagement and drive compliance.
- Early problem identification: Speech analytics can be used to understand call drivers including emerging problems. Real-time call analysis can alert agents to any new issues and encourage them to address the issue and implement corrective measures to nip the problem in the bud.
- Quality management: Be more confident in the validity of your quality scores and agent assessments with speech analytics software that automates analysis of all calls rather than relying on a small sample of contact centre interactions.
- Coaching contact centre agents: Coaching your call centre staff is much easier with post-call analysis available. This allows you to easily review the agents’ performance. This analysis can help you create personalised development strategies for each agent.
- Eliminate non-compliance: AI-led speech analytics can automatically score and assess all calls. This leads to increased agent compliance and reduces the risk of fines associated with non-compliance.
- Reduce average handling time: Most customers want quick and efficient resolutions over the phone. Insights from speech analytics software can give you powerful insights that help you design better scripts to reduce AHT and ultimately cut costs.
- Identify upselling opportunities: Eradicate the need for relying on your agent’s memory of what’s been said on the call. Real-time analysis can review calls and push alerts to agents to discuss new products or services.
AI-led speech analytics from MaxContact
Our solution prefilters out nearly 70% of all critical and problematic conversations that require further attention, letting contact centre managers take remedial action before it’s too late.
And if all this sounds expensive and complex, it really isn’t. We offer a fully integrated platform designed to work seamlessly with our feature-rich, cloud-based contact centre software. Information is presented as simple, actionable insight, accessed from a central control panel. No expertise is required to read or interpret data.
In other words, speech analytics from MaxContact gives you the information you need to deliver market-leading CX, even if your customers are not always as candid about your service as you’d like them to be.
Leveraging speech analytics for contact centre improvement
Book a customised demo to learn how our AI-led speech analytics can understand customer sentiment, improve call quality, and reduce churn in your contact centre.
