According to industry experts, speech analytics is one of the fastest growing areas of the contact centre technology market, and with good reasons. In an extremely competitive world, the future doesn’t necessarily belong to the businesses shouting loudest, but perhaps to those that can truly listen to their customers and learn from it to deliver outstanding service.
Speech analytics is particularly relevant and useful to businesses operating call centres because they enable them to extract crucial information out of unstructured data from customer interactions, identify patterns and take action to improve what they are selling or the way they are selling it.
By flagging up key sentences in conversations, companies can now analyse the main reasons why customers are calling them and address them if need be. If certain questions keep being asked, for example, adding them – with their answers – to your FAQs section could result in lowering call volumes by removing the need to call you to get such information. This will free up your agents’ time who will then be able to concentrate on calls generating revenue, or potentially enable you to reduce the size of your staff. All good news for your profit margin.
Speech analytics can also play a crucial role in understanding the root of customer dissatisfaction and improve whichever area is at fault. If the issue is a complex one that can’t be addressed, it will give you, at the very least, the opportunity to think about a way to mitigate its effect, and train your staff so that they can handle such calls more effectively.
In addition, speech analytics can help increase the revenue generated by your call centre by identifying opportunities to cross-sell and upsell. By analysing which conversations lead to more sales and what makes your top sellers so successful, it is possible to find the most effective patterns to close a deal and develop a coaching programme to improve your agents’ selling techniques as well as reduce missed opportunities.
If used in conjunction with best practices, speech analytics software can not only give a company invaluable insights into its audience but can also reduce overall costs and improve Key Performance Indicators. However, it is essential to remember that, to be effective, companies will need to develop coaching and training programmes specifically designed around the results produced by speech analytics.
