ICMI's Customer Management Insight - April 2008 - (Page 48)

EXPERT’S ANGLE Speech Analytics: Uncovering the Voice of the Customer BY DANIEL ZIV Imagine the frustration of trying to listen to your television, home stereo and MP3 player at the same time, all cranked up to full volume. It would be pretty difficult, and it certainly doesn’t make a lot of sense. Unfortunately, this is how many contact centers are operating today — with a lot of indiscernible “noise” and no real insight. It is becoming more and more apparent that organizations must turn off all this ambient noise to uncover the voice of the customer. Fortunately, the next generation of quality monitoring and speech analytics solutions is allowing enterprises to turn up the volume and still listen clearly to the voice of the customer. By extracting actionable intelligence from real customer and agent interactions, organizations can now animate unstructured data to institute enterprisewide change and improve overall customer service. TUNING IN AGENTS TO THE RIGHT STATION Speech analytics can help contact centers track the good and bad in customer-agent interactions to target areas for improvement and to develop and replicate best practices. Next-generation tools combined with a workforce management suite can give call centers both stability and flexibility. Speech analytics is an integral piece in an overall suite of integrated analytics strategy and can be successfully implemented to get agents aligned with the company programs. There are several ways that speech analytics can be used to gain insight into agent performance and then identify means for improvement. up training, coaching or process improvement. By applying speech analytics, organizations better focus their quality monitoring efforts on the key issues that matter most. Contact center managers can still evaluate a sample of calls for benchmarking, but speech analytics also helps quality monitoring calls focus on issues that impact contact center and enterprise performance, and as a result, the customer experience. By using speech analytics to drill down to the root cause of customer and agent issues, organizations can concentrate on problems that have the highest impact on companywide performance. For example, if reducing customer churn is important, speech analytics can be implemented to identify calls that indicate higher risk of churn and then apply automated root cause analysis to identify the key reasons. Based on those insights, they can suggest process and coaching improvements that can have a measurable impact. this intelligence to maximize overall center performance. Speech analytics has the ability to mine customer interactions to identify areas of agent proficiency, so managers can staff the contact center appropriately. For example, if an agent is particularly effective or efficient at certain actions such as upselling, managing an emotional situation or explaining the intricate nuances of a specific product, managers need to position these people at the right place at the right time — whether it’s to close a difficult deal or save an at-risk account. IDENTIFY IMPROVEMENT AREAS; TAKE CORRECTIVE ACTION Maximize Strengths Strong agents make a strong contact center, pure and simple. But undeniably, some agents will be more skilled in certain areas, and managers should be armed with Develop Priorities Many enterprises report that less than 15 percent of calls evaluated by supervisors are used for followicmi’s insight Speech analytics is powerful and should be used to improve processes, empower agents and identify root causes and trends. However, contact centers should be wary of using this powerful technology as a form of discipline. Speech analytics can enable quality monitoring software to identify where agents may need additional training. For example, contact center managers can isolate certain calls that focus around areas of agent weakness for targeted quality control. Contact center managers also have the capability to develop best practices learning content from recorded www.icmi.com | APRIL 2008 48 http://www.icmi.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of ICMI's Customer Management Insight - April 2008

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - April 2008 Operations: Small Call Centers, Big Potential Ad Index Contents Editor's Page Contact Center Spotlight People: Assessment Tools Recommended Reading Technology: Speech Recognition Special Feature: Best of Show Strategy: Service-to-Sales Success Expert's Angle - High Volume, High Stakes: A Better Strategy for Hiring Experts Angle - Secrets of Recruiting Success/Job Brands: Changing Applicant Reactions to Your Openings Experts Angle - Speech Analytics: Uncovering the Voice of the Customer

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - April 2008

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