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What Value Does Speech Analytics Provide To Businesses During COVID19?

With fewer face-to-face customer interactions taking place in 2020, contact centres are proving more valuable than ever. With huge volumes of queries from the public being directed towards call agents, the pressure is mounting and these businesses are looking for ways to continue providing the best customer service while ensuring their agents don’t become overwhelmed from the call loads.

One of the ways contact centres are overcoming these challenges is with the use of speech analytics. This software is nothing new, however, it has evolved and grown throughout recent years and businesses are now able to fine-tune it’s programming to get exactly what they want and need out of it, especially during the pandemic.

Time-Saving

Using paper records just isn’t conducive for any business, especially in a fast-paced industry such as contact centres. Updated systems with these copies can lead to severe delays and a backlog of work.

One of the most utilised speech analytics tools is the voice to text conversion feature. Speech analytics takes all customer interactions and can automatically convert these conversations in readable text, stored digitally for ease.

This means that managers and anybody else who needs to can have almost instant access to these files and can easily make sense of the information provided. It also means that agents do not have to waste time in-between calls making and necessary notes as everything is automatically stored for later use.

Prevent Call Backlog

Speech analytics software can detect the nature of a customer’s call by the words or phrases being said. These callers can then automatically be directed to the correct department, deducing the need to transfer callers and waste precious time in doing so, leaving agents free to answer calls they can help with.

Speech analytics can remove the need for an agent for many callers, with the detecting of phrases and determining needs from a customer, they can be directed to pre-recorded information that provides them with the answers they are looking for, alleviating the need for human interaction.

This helps to prevent a large backlog of customers on hold, something that many firms are becoming infamous for, improving the customer experience and helping to relieve pressure on call agents.

Remove Error and Increase Accuracy

One great example of this benefit is within the healthcare industry. Doctor’s handwriting is notoriously hard to read and often errors can occur due to someone else reading this and interpreting this wrongly or perhaps having to use the time to call the doctor in question, interrupting all party’s busy schedules, to obtain clarification.

Speech analytics software can convert all speech between doctors and their patients and convert this to text for those who are dispensing the prescription or treatment, meaning there is absolute clarity as to what is expected and needed.

During the pandemic, this is especially important as healthcare professionals are stretched to their limits trying to cope with rising numbers of COVID19 patients.

Identify New Customer Requirements

With the ‘new normal’, the world has drastically changed when it comes to customer demand. For example, fashion brands may have seen a rise in party dresses during the festive season, but are not seeing more loungewear being sold or perhaps travel firms are no longer seeing the public book flights abroad but are instead looking for entertaining staycation ideas.

While marketing teams can attempt to make predictions, there are always customer needs that can surprise us. Busy call agents don’t always have the time to make note of rising queries from customers and may not relay these back to relevant teams.

Speech analytics can determine patterns in customer behaviour and language used. This could be anything from seeking a product that has sold out or discontinues to something completely new to the business that could generate substantial revenue.

This could even be features that customers have witnessed within competitors. Speech analytics software allows businesses to easily identify these within the reports produced by the software. Sales and marketing teams can then adapt services accordingly to boost revenue while also keeping customers happy and actively showing they are responding to feedback.

Overall Customer Experience

With the entire world feeling pressure, it doesn’t take much for a customer to choose to leave a service. Emotions are high and the want to save cash at every avenue is common within the majority of us.

By improving customer service during COVID19, customer churn can be reduced and help keep the cash flowing during an uncertain economic time.

Speech analytics can analyze a customer’s speech to determine a better service, product or alternative to help with their query and ensure their needs are met, even when the agent wasn’t able to.

This can help provide the agent with prompts for suggestions and help clinch a sale or make sure customers remain with the business due to exceptional customer service.

While call agents should be able to do this alone, we are all human and can miss elements that are crucial within a call or new staff working from home can rely on voice analytics software for that extra bit of support needed.