By Matt Rocco and Jim Iyoob
Customer experience is the latest challenge faced today; brands must consider far more than simply the point of sale. To be specific, you need to analyze and understand the entire life cycle of each customer interaction. If your business has a contact center service, your agents are on the frontline. Whenever your customers have a question or need resolutions to their problems, they will reach out to your customer service team. This makes the contact center and agents the most important touchpoints for memorable customer service.
According to Microsoft, 61 percent of customers will never go back to a business if they have a poor customer experience. This scenario can remarkably improve if companies leverage the power of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven speech analytics to improve the way of engaging and serving customers.
In the age of customer experience, businesses must understand the power of AI and speech analytics. When combined with human intelligence, AI and speech analytics can take the customer experience to the next level. By utilizing AI, you can tap into all customer interaction data, making your contact center more effective, transforming your agents to be more efficient, and producing positive customer interactions that could create better customer satisfaction.
What are the Challenges Today’s Contact Centers Face?
It is a frequent problem for contact centers to face different service delivery issues. It has always been a challenge to find a balance between the number of agents available and the call volume. Due to the lack of available agents, customers often experience long wait times, which is one of the main reasons behind customer frustration.
In addition to agent availability challenges, there are overwhelming problems that contact centers face with data management. Contact centers need to continually leverage data for improving their processes and agent performance so they can understand customers well and satisfy changing needs. Many contact centers struggle with the growing volume of data and various issues with data collection, duplication, complexity, and data silos.
Data comes from many sources, often with different formatting. Additionally, the data that you get from the customer relationship management (CRM) system of your company can sometimes be flawed or incomplete. These challenges make it tough for modern contact centers to transform unstructured and structured data into meaningful insights that can help you understand what needs and expectations your customers have.
Why is Traditional Call Center Quality Monitoring Not the Solution?
Transcribing and analyzing every call or customer interaction is formidable. However, monitoring and understanding these interactions manually and resorting to a small sample of interactions is simply not enough. A few monitoring programs have a sound idea of what to look for but still tend to focus on specific metrics, such as abandonment, hold times, or interaction resolutions. While this information can be helpful, this type of monitoring tends to miss valuable information between agents and customers, leaving actionable insights buried in mounds of dark data.
Bridging the Gap with AI-Powered Speech Analytics
Gaps in quality monitoring for contact centers are nothing new. This leaves valuable insights left unobserved, meaning contact center agents are conducting business without the necessary information to provide the best support and services to their customers. This results in agents and customers feeling frustrated, with neither understanding how to find solutions to customer problems.
Finding solutions for agents and customers while trying to fill the gaps of quality monitoring can seem overwhelming. Artificial intelligence integrated speech analytics technology, however, can provide contact centers with valuable insights and resources for their agents, while meeting customer expectations and providing an excellent customer experience.
How Can Speech Analytics Make a Difference?
Contact centers can access a vital source of data while using speech analytics technology. Companies use it to analyze recorded customer calls to discern valuable insights to improve the customer experience. These analytics provide a more detailed view by covering a variety of data points such as the topic of the call, relevant keywords and phrases, the emotional intent of the agent and customer, and the duration of talk in the calls. The next step is to convert this gathered data into text or transcripts so that further analysis can occur.
This data is very crucial for businesses to understand and analyze the pain points for why customers end up leaving a negative review about the company or altogether abandon their purchase. For instance, if speech analytics in an e-commerce store’s contact center reveals that many customers take twice as long to complete the checkout and payment, this could signal to the business that it needs to make changes to its website and payment gateway to improve the user experience.
Additionally, speech analytics derived data can gather insights on agent performance which helps companies understand where to concentrate training, how to empower team members, and ways to create a more effective work environment for agents. Undoubtedly, analytics is an invaluable tool that can help your company grow and build strong relationships with customers.
What is the Power of AI-enhanced Speech Analytics?
Artificial intelligence is what brings the effectiveness of automation, speed, and predictive insights to speech analytics technology. There is an ever-increasing volume of data that modern contact centers must mine in today’s business environment. The standard contact center technologies like legacy call tracking software or CRMs are not able to help companies leverage this data in the best way possible.
AI is the differentiator. It provides businesses with the advanced capabilities to improve agent performance and service delivery. The real-time insights into each interaction from AI-powered speech analytics help them identify patterns and trends that cause customer churn. AI-enhanced analytics are also helpful for your business to reduce the number of calls in the contact center as it identifies patterns in repeat calls.
This can lead to a better understanding of your customer problems, and your business can take the appropriate steps to solve them. It can be anything from improving your brick-and-mortar or online experiences to optimizing agent training for better customer service resolutions. In some cases, artificial intelligence can even provide insights in real-time that agents can instantaneously use to improve their customer interactions.
AI Solutions for Evolving Problems
The contact center environment is constantly advancing. Each day brings different information, products, and ways of interacting with customers, as well as how agents are set up to provide those services.
Fortunately, the solution is here with the flexibility needed to solve these ever-changing concerns using AI-powered speech analytics. Brands have been mining for customer insights in small samples, but AI-speech analytics has the power to take vast amounts of data while sifting through every interaction.
By using AI, contact centers have an effective lens to dissect interactions, taking the guesswork out when the agent is interacting with customers. AI gives businesses insights into what their customers are experiencing and needing now. Today’s customers expect immediate results and with AI speech analytics, you can provide it.
Transform Your Contact Center Experience
Today’s business environment is that every customer interaction produces a data point that companies can leverage to understand their customers better. AI is the revolutionary tool that has the immense capability to help your business bridge the gap between the agents and your customer base. If you want to make the best use of AI-powered speech analytics in your contact center, the first step that your company needs to take is centralizing all the data across your organization into a unified platform that integrates and analyzes insights from multiple sources in a single place.
Along with these technological shifts, however, your business needs to leverage the power of human intelligence to deliver an effortless customer experience. Your team members are more data-aware than you know and can analyze this information to help your business accomplish both short and long-term objectives. Together with the efficacy of AI and speech analytics, along with your people’s valuable knowledge, experience, and unique skill set, your business will be able to make the most out of analytics to meet customers’ changing needs and deliver an experience that can transform your customers to brand advocates.
In Conclusion
With AI-powered speech analytics, organizations can drive efficiencies and performance as never before, allowing an overall view of end-to-end customer experience across every channel. It automatically mines crucial data from contact centers which in turn help drive value into the business and future customer interactions. As a result, businesses get a clear view of what customers want and need, how to train agents better, and how to provide an overall excellent customer experience, every time.
Are you ready to see what your customers say?
Make artificial intelligence and speech analytics, the two most revolutionizing technologies of this time, the integral parts of your contact center quality monitoring.
Matt Rocco is the president and CEO of Etech Global Services. He is a 37-year business executive veteran of the call center/BPO industry having spent time in every facet of call center operations and outsourcing processes.
Jim Iyoob is the chief customer officer at Etech Global Services. He handles strategy, marketing, business development, IT, program implementation, operational excellence, and product development across all Etech’s existing lines of business: Etech, Etech Insights, Etech Technology Solutions and Etech Social Media Solutions.
To learn more about how these intelligent innovations can help your business result in happy customers, dive into Etech’s white paper: “Improving CX and Contact Center Performance.”