For years, contact centres have been recording calls for training & monitoring purposes, it’s been the message played out to hundreds of thousands of customers over the years, but how many of those calls are listened to? The reality is just a very small percentage of all calls. Learn the importance and the benefits of using speech analytics software on your call centres to improve your overall customer experience.

Contact centre agents deal with hundreds of customers over the course of a working week, depending on the nature of the call, some calls may be long in duration & span across different agents within different teams. It’s the job of the quality assurance teams to listen to a selection of calls made by each agent often a random to ensure best practice is being adhered to, compliance is met & customers are being looked after in a satisfactory way.  

It can take quality assurance agents up to 2-3 times the duration of a call to listen then write up feedback. Which is understandably why only a small percentage of calls ever get listened to.  

Therefore, speech analytics is becoming more & more popular in the tech stack of contact centres.  

So, what is speech analytics? 

Speech analytics is AI technology that listens to calls & instantly analyses conversations converting them from speech to text. It takes mere seconds to convert the calls from voice into written notes that then allows you to quickly read through the notes to get an understanding of the conversation.  

Now let’s look at some of the benefits of using speech analytics in contact centres.  

Improve quality standards across the business. 

Speech analytics allows you to assess calls in real time enabling team leaders & supervisors to feedback anything that’s a cause for concern immediately. By acting on potential issues straight away, you can make sure that customers are being given the correct information & are also being looked after in a satisfactory manner. This also empowers agents as they are given feedback as soon as something is flagged up, when the feedback is given immediately, it will prevent them from making similar mistakes & gives them more confidence going into their next calls.  

Improve first contact resolution. 

Having access to large volumes of call data allows you to analyse patterns to better understand what’s happening across the business so you can understand what parts of the customer journey if any, are causing any issues. Once identified, you can quickly put fixes in place, train agents or teams & monitor calls to make sure any new information or processes have been understood & are being adhered too, ensuring customers are positively impacted sooner rather than later.  

This also takes away the stress of agents dealing with the same repeat issues that often take a while to rectify due to them not being identified earlier.  

Reduce compliance risks. 

Most contact centre agents are well trained when it comes to compliance & are fully aware of the regulatory guidelines.  

But it’s still easy for mistakes to be made, especially when dealing with high volumes of calls & even more so when it comes to how something is worded.  

Speech analytics software can be programmed to flag up any breaches in compliance. Both words & phrases that aren’t permitted can be flagged, notifying supervisors, quality assurance teams & even agents of any potential breaches.  

This provides an extra safety net for the business, more calls analysed & anything that could breach compliance is addressed before it happens again.  

Provides valuable real time information. 

In contact centres, call quality is a crucial & a key indicator for customer experience.  

Impacting errors immediately leads to a big improvement in customer service which leads to a better overall customer experience.  

By acting on things sooner rather than, you’ll find you encounter less errors leading to less complaints & less unnecessary call backs to customers to rectify any concerns.  

Free’s up time for leaders to manage more effectively. 

Listening to calls takes up a lot of time & although it’s the job of the quality assurance teams to mark calls; most team leaders tend to listen to calls to support their agents & to also get a better understanding of their agents training needs.  

By having large volumes of calls automatically analysed, team leaders & supervisors can read through & quickly identify which agents need extra support & what they need it on rather than painstakingly listening to calls for each agent.  

Having more time allows team leaders to get creative, plan training sessions, plan for weekly or monthly reviews & allow time for further self-development.  

In Summary  

Speech analytics is a cost-effective way to analyse more calls, adding an extra layer of security to your business.  

It can do the job of 100’s of people, quickly & effectively & provides valuable business insights in real time so you can quickly feedback & rectify any potential issues become it becomes a bigger problem.  

This is why its very important and beneficial to use speech analytics software on your call centres. It will improve your overall customer experience, lowers costs and improve efficiency.

QContact offers cloud-based software to help meet the demanding, ever evolving contact centre needs.  

Our solution is designed to make dealing with high volumes of inbound queries across all your channels easy & efficient, improving business processes through automation & AI & lowering costs.