How Trends Are Changing With Unified Communications
Unified telecommunications is a solution in the communications world that allows businesses to get more out of their crucial tools and applications, b...
Contact centers are a vital part of ongoing business success. Agents are ultimately responsible for all interactions and delivering a positive customer experience. One wrong decision and they can turn a loyal customer into a customer of the past. In a recent survey, we asked how likely customer are to switch suppliers if they have a bad experience with a call center and 68% scored between 7 and 10 on a 0 -10 scale that it heavily effects their decision to remain a customer.
Nearly all contact centers continually look for ways to improve their service and experience by reviewing and analyzing customer interactions and providing valuable feedback to their agents. In recent years, the use of speech analytics software and artificial intelligence to uncover valuable customer information has grown in popularity.
Speech Analytics
Speech analytics is a common technology solution contact centers use to review every customer conversation automatically. Without speech analytics, marketing, sales, accounting, and operations departments tend to work independently of one another. Department independence can make it difficult to understand what customers want and create a plan to meet their expectations. When a business adds speech analytics to the mix, data from every department is collected and transcribed into one database. This cohesive approach to understanding customers is much stronger, and lets businesses see how customers feel at various touch points in the customer journey.
Contact center managers can search and analyze customer conversations in the database to uncover trends across customers and departments. This information is used to create new procedures, fix products, and better train agents.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the future by teaching machines or robots how to learn from data and make decisions as humans would do. With the right implementation strategy, businesses will be able to automate activities, better understand customers, minimize expenses, and personalize the customer experience.
Combining the Two for the Optimal Customer Experience
Artificial intelligence is an additional layer of speech analytics software. AI takes analytics from merely a way to extract data and create a database for contact center managers to search and analyze to automatically reviewing the collected information and offering solutions. By teaching the software to make decisions that typically require human interaction, businesses set themselves apart from their competition in several ways.
- Deliver personalized customer experiences
Speech analytics listens to every conversation and captures information about the customer and their preferences based on statements mentioned and actions taken on your website. Artificial intelligence can turn this information into a personalized experience for customers by remembering previous requests and making suggestions proactively. The AI will also automatically tell the agent what the customer’s typical expectations are in addition to their past account details. This information will allow call center agents to deliver a better customer experience.
2. Improve cybersecurity
Cybersecurity is a growing trend for any business that collects data and payment information from customers. Speech analytics with AI features can identify potential fraudsters based on previous voice recordings or keywords mentioned on the call. The system automatically notifies the agent and manager of a likelyl fraud attempt so they can proceed with caution. Paypal reported a decline in fraud by utilizing AI and Axcess Financial reported a near 100 percent reduction in fraud after implementing CallMiner’s speech analytics.
3. 24/7 Customer Service.
Live agents can typically only handle one request at a time, and most companies can’t afford to staff an agent 24 hours a day. AI improves a company’s customer service and allows customers to interact with businesses 24 hours per day, 7 days a week. Chatbots are programmed to have in-depth conversations with customers based on how they answer questions and make decisions and suggestions just like a human. Customers are happier because they get answers quickly and on their schedule.
4. Solve customer problems quickly.
Eventually, speech analytics software with artificial intelligence capabilities will be able to automatically view data from conversations, pull customer trends, and provide suggestions or solutions automatically.
5. Personalize training for agents.
Automated call scoring is on the most beneficial tools of speech analytics because it gives real-time feedback to contact center agents after every call. In most cases, managers review this data and look for areas that agents need to improve as a whole or individually. AI will be able to automate this process and send training modules to agents instantly based on their scores.
6. Replace IVR.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) provides customers various options to choose from and based on their answers, routes them to the best agent for their inquiry. AI will change this and could eventually replace IVR because it will automatically recognize the customer’s voice and be able to interpret a customer’s request and route them to the right agent.
7. Review calls in more depth.
Contact centers can establish criteria to assure agents are adhering to scripts. For instance, if you want them to avoid certain phrases, you can add these phrases as keywords to notify you about. Statements such as “I don’t handle that” or “I don’t know” can quickly cause frustration and uncertainty in customers. AI will be able to notify managers in real-time, so they can intervene when necessary.
Artificial intelligence is the way of the future and shaping changes in speech analytics programs. Contact centers should consider comprehensive speech analytics programs that allow for an AI strategy. Businesses without an AI strategy won’t have the competitive advantage they need to see continued success in the customer-centric business world.
