On-Line Workshop on Speech Analytics Designed to Help Understand the Process

To take a step forward, sometimes you need to take a step back to assess where you want to go. Many businesses are eager to implement programs to move their CX needle but often delay in the process because they simply don’t know how to get started. Beyond the obvious decision of which one will be best suited to their needs, they must also weigh such factors as calculating short and long-term costs, developing a formula for achieving ROI, and doing due diligence on the level of vendor help in both getting off the ground and maintaining a successful program.

The new CrmXchange Build-it! series of how-to webcasts offers a head start by learning the basics of putting a successful program in place. Each webcast will provide step-by-step guidance to help launch programs in a variety of customer experience technologies. Registrants receive a worksheet to help them define their goals, identify the specific improvements they want to achieve and analyze the existing technology.

Professionals benefit from an in-depth review of which areas will make significant improvements. “How to Build a Speech Analytics Program- A Workshop” will be presented by CallMiner, one of the most respected solution providers in this space.

Recent research by DMG Consulting indicates that implementing speech analytics in contact centers pays for itself in less than one year, and TechTarget reports that it pays for itself in as little as three months. The many benefits include:

• Improving the Customer Experience
• Cost Savings
• Revenue Enhancement – Identifying Upsell/Cross-Sell Opportunities
• Improvement in Operations
• Helping to Promote Customer Loyalty & Retention
• Diminishing Compliance Risk Issues
• Reducing Average Handle Time

While contact center leaders have been hearing for years about what speech analytics can do, hardly any webcasts or white papers have discussed the mechanics of putting together a functional and successful program. This live workshop will focus on critical components that need to be considered:
•Goals: How to define and prioritize
•Data Collection: What information is needed, what does your business have and what is it missing
•Staff: How do you get the right departments involved and who needs to be included
•Reporting: Who gets reports, what format are reports in, reactions to new information

Register now and come away with a detailed outline of steps required to have your program hit the ground running. If you can’t make the live September event, the recording will be available for one year.

Don’t Make These Mistakes When Buying Speech Analytics Software

Speech analytics software is a major and important investment for the contact center. Your speech analytics software should help with compliance and customer service while getting you the highest ROI possible. Avoid these mistakes when searching for new speech analytics software.

1. Assuming speech analytics will do everything for you.

Speech analytics software isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it solution, no matter how smart the technology may be. The software gathers data that you then have to review, make sense of and act on in order to improve your contact center. Only then is it truly powerful; otherwise, it’s simply a data collector.

2. Not taking advantage of the software’s potential.

Speech analytics software has a number of standard benefits, like agent training and quality assurance. When you purchase modern software, though, you have access to a host of other features you may not even know are there. New speech analytics software may include escalation language and objective compliance, for example.

3. Choosing software with poor recording quality.

To truly reap the benefits of speech analytics software, it has to be able to record clearly and transcribe accurately. If it can’t, you won’t get a dependable analytics report. Remember, you can’t improve audio quality after a call has been recorded.

4. Purchasing software for executives who don’t listen to calls.

Software brands know how to dazzle customers to get more sales. However, if contact center management isn’t currently listening to and analyzing calls, this may not change even after pricey software is purchased. It’s better to get in the habit of analyzing calls so that you know the software will actually be used (and also so you’ll have a clearer view of your needs).

5. Relying on software that doesn’t account for conversational language.

Your agents have to say certain things on each call, like “thank you” when signing off. Your speech analytics software has to detect that these keywords are mentioned in each conversation. However, if your software only detects exact words instead of conversational language, a version of “thank you” will go ignored, and the agent could get marked for not following procedure, even if they did.

In Conclusion

When buying software, identify your contact center needs, then find a solution that checks those boxes. Make sure you’re learning from your analytics, too, instead of just letting it auto-run in the background.

 

Learn from this Sample Customer Journey: Booking a Flight to Boarding the Plane

Today’s customer journey considers the beginning-to-end experience that the user follows to complete a task. Often, the journey involves numerous channels and devices that all must interact with the customer wherever, whenever and however they want.

Air travel can be exhausting, both physically and mentally, especially if the many plans that have to be in place don’t come together. Delayed or canceled flights, difficulty scheduling backup flights, lost luggage and missed connections are just the beginning of the travel headache. Done correctly, the customer journey of a person who’s traveling can be greatly eased with intuitive messaging and thoughtful touch points. Consider this modern customer journey for the traveler:

• Book your flight online well in advance to secure the best ticket price.

• Receive a push notification from the airline’s mobile app that allows you to check-in the night before your flight.

• Choose the way you’d like to receive your boarding pass (saving it to your phone, via email, etc.).

• At the airport, visit a kiosk to scan the boarding pass on your phone and then print your baggage ticket.

• Show security your digital boarding pass.

• Receive immediate flight status updates through your preferred contact method (text message, email, app push notification, etc.).

• While on the flight, go to the airline’s website on your phone, tablet or laptop to watch movies.

Traveling of the past was often rife with long lines to get to an agent at the airport, paper boarding passes that can get easily lost and difficulty keeping up with the latest flight changes. The reason the new, digitally-enhanced customer journey flows so well is because the airline (or booking service) the traveler uses offers online and mobile access; remembers personal information, allowing the company to send customized alerts to individual travelers; has multiple digital options for doing necessary travel tasks, then syncs those options (saving the boarding pass to your phone then scanning it at the luggage tag kiosk); and generally keeps travelers in-the-know regarding their trip. Once on the flight, the company is further able to keep the traveler happy and entertained by offering in-flight Internet service and other types of free entertainment.

This type of customer journey takes into account the cornerstones that customers need: consistent and proactive service, optimized features, collaborative options and seamless transitions.

4 Voice of the Customer Tools for Collecting Feedback

Analytics often track what a customer does, but voice of the customer tools figure out why someone performs an action. Several voice of the customer tools can be used to collect feedback. The feedback tool you choose depends on your goal.

1. Community Forums

Customers can discuss their experiences with one another in forums. These are great places to find out what customers need and which needs aren’t being met. They’re hubs for suggestions and ideas that a brand can use to guide everything from product development to customer support practices.

2. Visual Feedback

Brands that have recently launched a new website or mobile app can benefit from visual feedback tools. Elements on a page will have the option to provide feedback. The customer can make a note about what they think about a specific element and then a screenshot will be sent to the appropriate department or agent. The customer uses his or her own words to describe a problem, which helps brands figure out which parts of a page or app are faulty or unclear.

3. E-shop Reviews

E-shop surveys are auto-emailed to customers after they purchase or receive a product. A short assessment survey asks the customer to rate their experience or the product on a scale of one to five. There’s also a section where customers can write in an account of their experience. The benefits of this type of feedback are twofold. First, the brand learns about the customer’s experience and can opt to reach out to the customer if they submit low scores or describe a problem. Second, if the star ratings are published on a review site, other shoppers will be influenced by them, and a brand with high ratings will attract more customers.

4. Speech Analytics

Speech analytics delve deep into a recording to uncover intelligence from customer-agent conversations. Advanced software digs through dialogue to isolate specific phrases and words. Results can be organized and then compared to reason codes (why customers contacted support) as well as trends to determine recurring problems.

Voice of the customer feedback tools help contact centers to determine what people do and do not like about a brand. By pinpointing why someone may choose, stay with or leave a brand, the entire customer journey can be updated and adapted to meet specific customer needs.

 

How to Make the Most of Your Contact Center’s Speech Analytics

Speech analytics work best when the correct processes are in place. Without the right objectives, you won’t know what to specifically measure. Without involving the rest of your team, you won’t be able to leverage the data you collect. Keep the following tips in mind to maximize your speech analytics efforts.

1. Get Clear About Your Objectives

Speech analytics can be used in a variety of ways. Do you want to improve the customer experience? Do you want to enhance the skills of the sales team? Are you worried about quality assurance? Knowing which objectives you need to focus on will guide you when it comes to analyzing the data.

2. Get Your Team on Board

When you’re giving your speech analytics regime an overhaul, everyone from management to your customer service agents need to be in-the-know. Whoever is going to be affected by the technology, particularly those who will benefit from it, should be involved. The best speech analytics programs don’t just involve technology, but also cooperation from various departments.

3. Create a Training Program

If you’re setting up a new speech analytics program, your employees may benefit from some education and training. There are likely to be big changes when it comes to goal-setting, workflow, and how teams interact with one another. The speech analytics team and the contact center agents should have communication from the beginning. Agents will need to know how the new speech analytics plan will benefit them and the contact center as a whole.

4. Prepare for Even More Change Than Expected

There’s often a domino effect that occurs when making a big change to a contact center. When one process changes, it could cause another to change unexpectedly. Speech analytics may streamline many of your business processes, but it could also uproot others, a shift you probably didn’t prepare for. Change management requires agility. If you can’t respond and adapt to the new issues that pop up, you’ll become paralyzed.

5. Create a Plan for Reporting Data

Collecting data is one thing, but all of that information needs to be disseminated and analyzed. Relevant departments should receive reports that they can then act on. Keeping everyone in the loop will help your speech analytics program to be more impactful and it will also garner the support of all involved.

4 Important Categories of Contact Center Analytics

 

Contact centers collect a lot of data. They can find out what their customers are doing on a daily basis. They can determine what time a customer contacted support and how long their contact lasted. They can listen carefully to conversations and decide if a customer is happy or angry based on certain keywords. All of this data helps the contact center do things like reduce call times and examine agent performance. To be competitive, contact centers have to stay focused on the customer. By keeping track of customer service metrics, contact centers can make decisions based on reliable data.

1. Speech Analytics

Speech analytics help contact centers improve a customer’s phone call experience. Customer service agents are monitored to ensure they’re adhering to scripts and following regulations. This can also pinpoint the areas in which an agent needs additional training. Speech analytics will also segment hard-to-handle calls so that they can be dealt with by a supervisor or an agent with more experience. Furthermore, speech analytics can determine the reason for the customer’s call, what they hope to get out of the call, and if they are happy, upset, stressed, satisfied, etc.

2. Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Analytics

Intuitive IVR systems improve the customer experience. Insights that can be gleaned from IVR analytics include the percentage of callers who want to speak with a live agent and their reason for doing so; the reason for the transfer of calls between departments; the percentage of callers who were not identified accurately; and the number of calls that were handled from start to finish by IVR.

3. Overall Customer Satisfaction

Gauging overall customer satisfaction will give you an idea of how well you’re delivering the entire customer experience. In order to measure customer satisfaction, the CSAT score is often used. The contact center will ask the customer to rate their satisfaction with a specific experience, like an interaction with the company or a transaction. For example, the customer may be asked to rate their satisfaction on a scale of one to ten. Any answer that’s a six or above means the customer is satisfied. To figure out the percentage of satisfied customers, the number of customers who responded with a satisfied rating is divided by the total number of customers who were surveyed.

4. Predictive Analytics

Tracking analytics isn’t worth much if you’re not going to take the information and figure out how to improve the contact center. Predictive analytics show the changes that will most impact the performance of the contact center. Management can then figure out the best way to communicate with customers, retain happy customers and resolve problems with dissatisfied customers.

One single metric will not give you a useful view of customer service quality. Instead, several metrics that are carefully chosen based on your customer service goals have to be followed. Tracking analytics allows the contact center to improve, update and revamp their programs on a regular basis.