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It’s time to use the data, the insights and the analytics to see inside customer minds. Wynand Smit, CEO of INOVO, digs down into conversations to find the nuggets of information. 

What do customers want? What makes them irate? What inspires them to loyalty? These are the questions that every organisation wants answered. And the search for these answers is precisely why speech analytics has been defined as a contact centre mega-trend. A mega trend that has proven its value time and again, which is why 58% of CIOs cite data analytics as a priority, and why advanced analytics has seen a 50% increase in conversion rates.  Add to this the fact that the past two years have seen more people pick up the phone to resolve a problem than ever before – 75% prefer human interaction with a shift in attitude thanks to the impact of the pandemic. 

As customers leverage multiple touchpoints to gain access to a company, the contact centre remains a staple of customer interaction, and one that can potentially change a customer’s relationship with the company. Research has found that most customers will simply stop using a company after they’ve had more than three terrible interactions with customer service, and a significant percentage blame badly automated telephone systems as one of their biggest frustrations.

What every one of these statistics shows is how important people and technology are to the success of customer service for any business. In a recent analysis of speech analytics and how invaluable they’ve become to the business, McKinsey highlights how the contact centre has evolved. It has moved beyond just a person on a phone to becoming an Omni-centre into which all information and insights about the customer must flow. This is the final line that customers often have to cross in order to resolve a serious issue or engage more fully with the company, which makes it critical for companies to have line of sight into how the contact centre operates and engages with these customers.

In the past, assessing the success of any contact centre interaction was a hit and miss affair. Conversations had to be randomly and manually sampled and assessed against very specific criteria. Often, these criteria were based on key performance indicators (KPIs) that related to the contact centre employee and not the customer which meant that the data missed the mark by a wide mile. It was also often an unfair picture painted of an engagement as it only snatched snippets, not the entire call history of an operator. So, if the snippets were negative, then the agent would be penalised. 

Fortunately, this has changed. Contact centre solutions have evolved to the point where they can analyse every call against multiple keywords and KPIs. And this not only reveals a whole new world of insights that can potentially change bottlenecks and unnecessary complications that could be impacting on customer loyalty, but changes how the company empowers its agents and call centre capabilities. With improved language processing capabilities, better metrics, smarter systems, and the ability to layer intelligent tech on top of legacy architecture, companies can use multiple sources and insights to transform how they connect with customers. 

With speech analytics, the contact centre is better placed to understand the everyday conversations that take place between customers and agents. They can use the technology to define specific parameters and thereby identify legacy issues that may consistently arise in contact centre engagements. They can use insights to discover opportunities previously hidden within the litres of data produced by the contact centre every day, and take advantage of them in multiple ways. This can be anything from removing a bottleneck that has caused significant agent and customer frustration, to adding value to a specific product offering, to refining business strategy to better meet customer demands.

Today, speech analytics have evolved considerably. They can be used to identify specific trends within the data and contact centre by mining conversations and grouping the insights into predefined categories. These can include repeat calls, payment conversations, or unexpected charges. If these are customised properly, decision makers can see how these categories are performing and catch potentially damaging issues before they get out of hand. It can also be used to automate quality assessments, discover new trends that have previously gone unnoticed, and reshape how the contact centre engages, both internally and externally. As customer attitudes change, markets shift, and trends pivot, speech analytics have become a powerful ally for contact centres and companies that want to stay right on the edge of innovation and brilliant customer service.