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The Value of Call Center Speech Analytics

This article was published on August 2, 2021

As businesses adapt to ever-increasing expectations for stellar customer service, insights from analytics have been found to be particularly powerful assets for improving the customer experience and boosting sales. Organizations are leveraging the capabilities of call center speech analytics to gain a more complete, holistic picture of customer pain points and preferences. Here's how companies are using the insights gained from customer service phone calls to drive growth and stay competitive.

The Value of a Human Conversation

Though many customers are engaging with businesses via chat and text messaging, a good portion of them still would like to have a conversation with a fellow human being on the phone when they have a tricky question or urgently need help. According to a recent study cited by the blog Contact Center Pipeline, 79 percent of consumers still prefer the human touch when engaging with brands and service providers. They might reach out using an email or a quick chat session if their request is simple, but they tend to want to connect with a person on the phone for complex requests.

When customers make these calls, businesses have an opportunity not simply to assist with the issue at hand, but to better understand the customer's deeper concerns and motivations. Businesses can use call center speech analytics to measure sentiment and other key elements of the conversation to discover how effective their current processes are and optimize them even further. In doing so, they can gain a more complete view of the customer experience they deliver.

With companies facing increased expectations to deliver high quality service to their customers at every turn, there has never been a better time to take advantage of call center speech analytics.

The Benefits of Call Center Speech Analytics

What, you might ask, can a company actually measure over the course of a human conversation? Although it may seem difficult to quantify the dynamics of a phone call, there is a great deal of insight that a company can gain by applying analytics to interactions. For example, a company can assess whether a customer is satisfied or becoming unhappy by gauging pitch and tone during the call. It can also define specific keywords and phrases that may indicate a customer interaction is going particularly well or, conversely, heading in a problematic direction. Using the insights gained, the company can shorten call handling time — a major customer pain point — improve first-call resolution, and better its self-service offerings.

Call center analytics are also valuable for monitoring and enhancing employee performance. Speech analytics can, for example, highlight areas where a particular agent needs additional training. Such insights can also help a business maximize talent resources by escalating certain types of calls to specific representatives who have the right experience and knowledge to resolve issues. They can analyze trends among their top-performing agents to develop best practices for other team members to follow. A supervisor who has access to this information in a dashboard can use it to provide hands-on guidance to new agents or develop workforce optimization strategies that further enhance the call center's capabilities.

Taking the Customer Experience to the Next Level

Of course, understanding customer needs and improving call center performance are priorities for any organization today. But businesses can also leverage the insights they gain from utilizing analytics to improve their business processes, products, and services at an even higher level. For example, analytics can enable businesses to spot common issues that prompt customer calls and improve their products accordingly. Trends may highlight the need to optimize business processes and marketing channels that feed into the call center, such as the website. Businesses even use the analytics to identify opportunities for agents to upsell and cross-sell certain products, maximizing the company's overall sales opportunities.

Businesses are also increasingly turning toward advanced contact centers to gain a complete, 360-degree view of the customer experience. For example, an omnichannel contact center integrates a traditional voice call center with chat and email capabilities. Representatives can start an interaction on one channel and seamlessly move it to another, meeting the customer on the channel of their choice and engaging with them far more flexibly than they could in the past. An omnichannel approach is especially valuable in today's digital age, where customers expect to reach brands at a moment's notice on their preferred channel and receive timely, consistent, personalized service.

With companies facing increased expectations to deliver high quality service to their customers at every turn, there has never been a better time to take advantage of speech analytics. By better understanding what customers need and want, businesses can enjoy multiple benefits on an ongoing basis: improved customer retention, bottom line growth, better workforce optimization, even insight into opportunities for product and service enhancement. Any business seeking a competitive edge in today's marketplace will find those advantages worth investigating.

Contact Vonage Business to learn more about how call or contact center solutions can assist your company.

Vonage Staff

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