ICMI's Customer Management Insight - April 2008 - (Page 49)

EXPERT’S ANGLE customer interactions — and share them with other agents for training purposes. A quality monitoring solution can automatically trigger e-learning and other training based on performance, as well as the rollout of new products, services and processes. This is why a unified workforce optimization suite with tight integration into quality monitoring, performance management, e-learning and workforce management is critical, helping to ensure that speech analytics insights are turned into action. THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT Although the contact center is the front line of an organization, an amazing number of companies blindly develop strategies based on what they want to deliver and what’s convenient for them versus what customers are asking for. Speech analytics allows organizations to flip conventional thinking on its head and develop marketing, sales, product and other strategies based directly on customer feedback and input. Today, enterprises are implementing technologies that allow them to adopt a more customer-centric operation model that places customer needs front and center. The challenge is that customers are a moving target and tastes, needs and levels of satisfaction are constantly changing. Speech analytics helps enable enterprises to track the customer’s pulse by providing insight into what they are saying. Information and insights gained through speech analytics can then be leveraged beyond the contact center to develop more effective marketing strategies, address product issues, or even surface vendor or partner issues that are causing icmi’s insight dissatisfaction. For example, a company may launch a new product and then use customer feedback within the first three days to determine what adjustments may need to be made in order to increase sales and customer satisfaction. The customer and business data and insights gained from speech analytics are very different from other structured data sources. The challenge for contact centers is knowing what to look for and how customers express themselves, especially since a specific key word may have very different meanings in varying contexts. A solution and approach that allows an organization to interactively search and reveal issues they may not otherwise know how to predefine is critical for a successful speech analytics implementation. The more input that is gathered through customer interaction and speech analytics, the greater the opportunity to engage business leaders outside the contact center. Some of the suggested actions may involve process changes or even adjustments to product and service offerings. This may require wider management approval and crossdepartmental support. In the end, sharing your findings with key business leaders will help build the consensus and support required to bring about necessary changes that will ultimately benefit the customer. An analytics-driven, enterpriseenabled solution is therefore key to impacting not only contact center efficiencies but true enterprise effectiveness. some concerns about it requiring a significant amount of horsepower to process the large amounts of audio collected in the contact center. Since then, there has been a major reduction in processing costs, in addition to significant improvements in processing speed and performance. This has led to the transition from processing quantity to processing quality. Early offerings, such as phoneticsbased solutions, focused on speed of processing but could only search for specific keywords. These have evolved into solutions that mine and retain the full content and context of all words used in the interaction between the customer and the agent, and focus on accuracy and quality of insights they can surface automatically. This focus on quality of insights supports the three development layers of speech analytics functionality: search, categorization and automated root case. These advanced capabilities are giving even more power to understanding unstructured customer interactions today. Search Search capabilities identify words and phrases that are spoken in customer interactions. By conducting a search query, users can look for a keyword or phrase and then deliver a prioritized list of results — from one to one million calls or more. Categorization By leveraging the full content and context or words, speech analytics can develop more accurate business categories, such as customer complaints, billing issues, product feedback, repeat calls and even emotional calls. Categorization can provide quantitative information www.icmi.com | APRIL 2008 Pump Up the Volume About five years ago, when speech analytics was first introduced into the contact center, there were 49 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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