With typically 2-3% of most customer interactions being monitored by your Quality Assurance function you can see why some contact centres are moving towards implementing speech analytics as a tool.
But how do you make sure that the new Speech Analytics tool doesn’t gather dust and you use it to really propel your Customer outcomes and your Customer experienece to another level. In this short blog we talk about how you can develop a Speech Analytics strategy that can move your Quality assurance outcomes to the next levels and give you meaningful intelligence on what’s happening in the bulk of your customer calls.
So with the standard volume of Quality monitoring being approx. 2-3% this means we have an exposure rate of 97% of customer calls not being monitored which is quite a risk, especially if you are working in a regulated environment.
Before you start with the implementation of Speech analytics the first suggestion would be to look at your existing outcomes and understand what they are telling you about the problems you might be experiencing already.
Trying to bucket these into key areas can help you define what your Speech Analytics strategy might need to be and what you want to start to look out for. Often in regulated roles you are looking for evidence of the following
1. Miss selling practices
2. Misleading information
3. High Pressure sales tactics
4. Evidence of customer vulnerability
5. Evidence of Complaints or dissatisfaction
Speech analytics can identify this in two ways, sentiment analysis and key word or key phrase patterns, but in order to really gather good intelligence we need to be clear on what we want the Speech engine to find and refine this regularly, so speech isn’t just a static view at one point we need to work the data and take action with the findings.
With a major high street bank being fined by the FCA £64m for poor processes and procedures surrounding how they handled Vulnerable customers this sentiment analysis and key word phrase identification can be a major benefit in getting to the root cause of customer dissatisfaction and vulnerability.
But Speech Analytics alone won’t improve your Customer and or Employee experienece, shining a light on a problem you already know exists will only shine a brighter light on the problem, and whilst the scale of the problem is useful to know for redress and remediation purposes, you have to actually do something to drive a change.
So what are the benefits to Speech Analytics:-
1. It can help identify areas where we can improve first call resolution reducing the need for multiple follow ups and hand offs
2. It can support large scale root cause analysis which creates more capacity for team leaders to coach rather then chained to desks listening to call outcomes.
3. Identify common Compliance errors and enable training and coaching interventions to close down the gap
4. Support you to grow particular product lines by understanding how often they are discussed on the calls or missed by agents?
5. Enhance customer experienece by equipping team leaders to act quickly to negative sentiment and close the loop on customer redress.
The list goes on and tracking some of these metrics and understanding where you are now can easily make the benefits case for speech analytics which isn’t as costly as you might think. 
Top tips for people considering a move into Speech Analytics:-
1. Review your current QA outcomes to identify trend areas in your QA score card that need exploration
2. Develop a clear strategy for Speech analytics and what areas of your business you want to target
3. Create Buckets or segments for what you want to explore e.g. “complaints”, “Retention” , “Vulnerability”
4. Drill down into key segments to understand trends and performance of your business and if what you expect to find matches the reality?
5. Don’t use Speech analytics tools as a weapon to hit your frontline teams over the head with QA but do use it to get a full picture of the size or scale of any issues and tackle with training and coaching.
6. Share Insights – quite often speech analytics can be shrouded in mystery and secrecy, be open with your findings and validate and share them with the operational teams to help create a more efficient operation.
If you have Speech analytics tools and are using them well, I’d love to hear from you or if you are just starting out on your speech analytics journey or just need some help refine your strategy then drop me a line or visit www.fabsolutions.co.uk
