Workforce Management Featured Article
Analytics Provide a Boost to Human Contact Center Agents
During a typical agent-customer contact center phone call, a lot gets said by both agent and customer. But reading a transcript of the conversation might not convey some of most important information. Voice tone (such as sarcasm), overlapping conversation and raised voices might raise red flags about the call. In the past, recognizing clues beyond the words in the conversation was something only the human ear could do.
Today, however, speech analytics solutions can go beyond recognizing the words in a conversation and also analyze other factors. This technology can flag supervisors that there is a problem call happing in real-time. It can identify recorded calls that may need a supervisor’s attention or follow-up call from customer retention specialists. Increasingly, speech analytics can help with workforce management by determining which agents are the best choices to handle certain calls, according to a recent blog post by Chuck Ciarlo, CEO of workforce optimization solutions provider Monet Software (News - Alert).
“By analyzing vocabulary and emotion, a speech analytics solution can improve the routing of calls to agents best suited to handle them, and provide additional insight into how products and marketing campaigns are being received,” he wrote.
Escalated calls, for example, can be analyzed to pick agents who have demonstrated skill in calming angry customers, for example, or talking a customer about to churn into giving the company another chance. All this information can be mined from calls and passed onto the specialist agent in advance.
Speech analytics technology can also help make some useful predictions in the customer relationship by detecting where a conversation is going before it gets there. While we like to think all agents are capable of reading clues in voice tone and word usage by customers, it’s not always possible, particularly if the agent is a newbie, or a veteran tired from a long day of taking calls.
“By combining data mined from previous calls from the same customer, specific word choices and tone of voice, it may be possible to mitigate an angry tirade before it starts – or detect an attempt at a fraudulent transaction before any damage is done,” wrote Ciarlo.
Analytics applied to the contact center can also help companies read important insights into non-voice calls, including social media posts, self-service and digital channels.
“You may not be able to sense mood from a customer’s voice this way, but contact patterns and word choice can be analyzed to determine the most appropriate next step,” wrote Ciarlo.
Contact center agents already have difficult jobs. Technology such as analytics can help give them an advantage and a boost to do the right thing at the right time to improve the customer experience.
Edited by Alicia Young