7 Speech Analytics Best Practices in Call Centers

People all around us seem to be talking a lot about artificial intelligence and machine learning. 

Running a call center? It may be hard to imagine how it can possibly help your use case, correct? 

It’s not that hard after all.

Conversation intelligence software not just allow you to drive automation at your call center.

Speech analytics in call center gives you the ability to get deeper into the conversations and pinpoint the factors that separate a great call from an average one. 

Do you know that the global call center applications AI market is expected to record a CAGR of more than 25.8% over a 5-year period between 2019 and 2024? 

A. Why speech analytics for call center is important?

A recent global study by MIT Technology on 600 executives has made some impressive revelations.

According to this, more than 90% of North American companies have already integrated some kind of AI-enabled platform into their systems with an aim to enhance customer experience.

What is driving this growth are trends similar to what close to 60% of the respondents here have full confidence in.

They strongly believe that AI-based solutions will easily increase customer lifetime value within just a year.

Speech analytics comprises capturing all the conversations with your customers through call recordings, intelligent transcriptions and scoring models. 

Yes, no more living on caffeine and staying up all night, straining your ears to make sense of what is being said over the phone!

How can it impact your productivity, you ask?

B. 7 Speech Analytics Best Practices in Call Center

1. Increased customer-specific insights

Speech analytics for call center helps you discover customer insights that were, till this point, hidden in your call recordings. 

Numerous key data points from customer conversations can be highlighted and recorded for future reference.

Not only can you understand the behavior of the customers, at times you can even anticipate their future responses better. 

You can comprehend what keywords were spoken by your agents and what terminology invoked a positive response from your customers.

It’s also easy to identify the value propositions that interest your customers more. 

At the same time, any inappropriate language and terminology used by your customer can be immediately flagged so that you know which calls & customer issues need your urgent attention.

After all, you don’t want an irate customer. Do you?

2. Facilitates engaging discussions 

To come up with more engaging and interesting conversations is something that every call center aspires to.

You don’t want your agents to behave like robots.

Conversation intelligence helps you not just transcribe your calls but also analyze different kinds of emotional responses, both from your agents and the customers. 

You can easily categorize the terminology, phrases, and sales lingo used by your executives that gather positive responses. 

It will become easier for you to coach all your sales representatives, whether they are new or old, on the best practices when crafting a great conversation pitch.

3. Relevant questions to address pain-points

Your phone call records and conversations are one of the most underrated resources of your organization.

Useful interactions with your previous customers can also function as a reference point when engaging with a new customer. 

There are times when a customer can’t express their concerns in specific or clear terms.

This is where your calling executives and sales team will have access to more pertinent with relevant queries and questions to help your customers put forth their concerns clearly. 

Using speech analytics software, you can understand what your customers are trying to convey and how to address those pain points more efficiently.

4. Monitor 100% of conversations, automatically

So, you have put the plan into action.

You will be scaling your contact center pretty soon.

But there is a catch.

It’s going to become increasingly difficult to listen to every conversation that your agents will have with the end customer. 

Getting visibility into the performance of your calling agents will become even more complicated as your quality teams can listen to just a handful of calls each day. 

This is where conversation intelligence for call centers is going to simplify this process for you.

You don’t need to miss out on any conversation data at all. 

All your call recordings will be automatically analyzed so that you can drive critical conversation insights, including the following:

• What were the call outcomes?
• Were your calling agents effective or not while communicating with the customer?
• Were agents empathetic to the customer’s pain points and problems?
• Were they using and applying the training techniques that have been taught to them?
• Were they sticking to their calling theme, capturing all the necessary information, but without sounding like a bot?

5. Quality assurance hypothesis

Quality assurance is a critical function in any call center. This is the only way to improve agent conversation.

However, this is a labor-intensive process that requires a human to listen to conversations.

As a result, it also turns out to be a luck-based process since its impractical to manually listen to every single call.

Conversation intelligence overcomes this critical hurdle.

Speech AI can listen to every single interaction, derive intelligence, improve call quality and generate insights for your quality teams.

All of a sudden, the entire focus of your QA team shifts from listening to conversations to processing the insights & running better training and coaching sessions.

As a result, your organization proactively plugs in insight-to-performance gaps in the agent interactions. 

Additionally, giving your calling team contextual feedback and unbiased opinions (that too in real-time) is going to give them the guidance that they need to remain 100% effective.

The idea here is to provide them actionable feedback, backed with relevant actionable data and implementing automated quality management in the contact centers.

 

6. Targeted coaching for agents

Conversation intelligence is going to help you in agent onboarding, training, and coaching, and improving your overall performance directly.

This is made possible by AI surfacing out opportunity areas automatically, that too at the agent level.

Conversation intelligence covers very critical topics such as the mode of operations, different forms of compliance, script adherence, and a lot more.

This gives you an overall picture of the interaction that the team is having with the customers.

Not just that, you can set benchmarks that define the performance of every individual agent.

For example, using software like Enthu.AI you can easily set baselines for minimum script compliance scores or must-have call moments and can measure all the agents against those benchmarks.

That’s how you can identify coaching opportunities for individual agents.

7. Go beyond call outcomes

Conversation intelligence for call centers is not just about positive and negative responses.

It is not just about the duration of the call or whether it led to a sale or not.

It’s a toolkit to identify answers to a lot more difficult questions.

Following is a list of queries that the software can easily solve for you:

Conclusion

Wouldn’t you want your calling agents to improve their conversational skills and be of more assistance to your customers?

If your quality/operations team has access to not just the call recordings but also the entire call insights, they can definitely drive better results.

With speech-to-text analytics in call center you can expect your agents to be hitting targets more often, all thanks to their improved conversations and customer service.

It is upon you how you choose to empower them and make them more helpful and efficient in the long haul.

FAQs