The Changing Dynamics of the Contact Center
The industry has stabilized over the past month from an overall occupancy perspective. Companies have begun adjusting to remote work, and the new realities brought on by COVID-19. Call volume has declined slightly across contact centers in some verticals but skyrocketed in others.
Contact center leaders and customer experience (CX) executives will need the ability to listen to the voice of the customer to understand which employees need improvement and coaching. They also must capture signals across the entire customer journey that can lead to operational improvements and the ability to deliver seamless experiences.
Speech Analytics, a True Game Changer
With AI-driven speech analytics, we can now unlock the signals in each call to enable organizations to have a single view of the customer experience and the ability to drive rapid efficiencies and greater performance within the call center.
If you’re looking at new ways to understand your customers at a larger scale and improve the end-to-end customer experience, speech analytics is a great solution.
Here are five things to observe when considering speech technology:
- Quality Transcription Means Quality Data: Transcription quality should be reliable right out of the box, and your technology partner should ensure you have custom languages and topic lexicons pre-defined and installed. That can save you many hours of personal tuning. You should also ensure you can import call transcriptions into other solutions, which will add value to your existing tech stack and create a seamless workflow for visibility of action.
- The Power to Understand and Predict: AI can help you quickly understand complex data in ways much deeper than just understanding trending topics. In addition to dialogue transcription and text analytics, speech solutions should also provide acoustic analytics to detect silent time, over talk and vocal emotion. That enables more ways to see what topics are driving the negative or positive customer impact and helps agents learn to solve customer pain in a way that increases satisfaction.
- Automate Analysis and Empower Your Teams: Look at speech analytics from the lens of quality assurance: you now can automate call evaluation, which replaces a lengthy manual process of QA listening to calls to evaluate agent performance. Having this automatic evaluation of each call or all for a specific agent or team, is of significant value and will enable time to be spent coaching for excellence. By giving frontline agents their own dashboard, you can empower them to self-coach and improve areas of poor performance, especially crucial in remote working environments.
- Future Proof Your Business: Think about your needs today, but stay agile in your approach. Avoid the per-seat model of buying speech analytics as you may find your workforce evolving into one that is both call center and remote. You must able to flex up or down rapidly. Equally, while your demand remains steady, you could have a broader mix of shifts and a greater number of employees, so create a plan that maximizes occupancy and productivity. Also, make sure your chosen technology partner has an agile and significant roadmap that can grow with you.
- Value Realization: Work with your partner upfront to make sure the solution is easy to use, intuitive, and quick to deploy. Gone are the days of waiting nine to 12 months to get an on-premise solution stood up and then another 90 days to fine-tune before getting accurate results. Ask your partner what its current user engagement number looks like — this will tell you how much users love technology. Make sure your license gives every user access to custom dashboards so everyone can see the data gold relevant to their role.
Although contact centers didn’t have any choice but to change or adapt as a result of COVID-19, we have learned valuable lessons and are starting to feel comfortable with being uncomfortable. Having the right technology in place and taking an agile approach to CX will be crucial to understanding your contact center customers and delivering seamless experiences across the entire customer journey.
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