With contact centre agents at the forefront of a business’ interaction with its customers, it’s no wonder companies spend an initial two to six weeks training each agent before they even interact with a customer.
But once the agent is fully operational, how do we define and measure the success of their performance? By the number of sales made? By whether a customer demands to speak with a superior? By inconsistent and frequently incorrect CSAT scores?
With the evolution of AI-powered speech analytics that transcribe and analyse 100% of calls in real-time, companies adopting the technology have been handed the key to a treasure chest full of invaluable and actionable sentiment-based insights.
Sentient Machines recently spoke with Phil Bruce, a former contact centre coach who, when using our leading edge analytics platform to optimise the onboarding and development of his contact centre agents, saw a 30% increase in call quality.
In the above video, Phil mentions listening skills as key to making a successful sale. Below, he elaborates further, suggesting that a sales agent should first understand the customer’s needs before attempting to offer a solution.
“Not only do our words matter, but also the tone which we use has a huge impact.” - Dr Hyder Zahad (HuffPost)
As well as automatically measuring the listening skills of each agent, the Sentient Analytics platform reads and tracks emotions throughout customer interactions by analysing both lexical and acoustic sentiment - so what is being said, but more importantly how it is being said.
For some, there is scepticism surrounding the use of artificial intelligence within contact centres and whether its advancement could render human beings obsolete. At Sentient Machines, we believe in an ethical use of the technology in order to enhance current processes, not replace them.
By combining AI-mined insights with human analysis, you have the power to create a sophisticated contact centre QA process and drive transformative outcomes.
Interestingly, an Opus Research Survey revealed that 72% of companies believe speech analytics can lead to improved customer experience, 68% regard it as a cost saving mechanism, and 52% trust that speech analytics deployment can lead to revenue enhancement.
Of course, cost must always be factored in, but research by DMG Consulting indicates that speech analytics in contact centres pays for itself in less than one year, and Techtarget reports that it can pay for itself in as little as three months.
“Speech analytics can make substantial, quantifiable contributions to contact centers, but this is only one of the many use cases for this highly flexible and effective application.” - Donna Fluss (DMG Consulting)