What value is held in voice data for call centers?

In 1957 Sir Francis Bacon said that “knowledge is power” and 62 years later this sentiment still holds true, with organizations and businesses putting more focus on data gathering initiatives.

Organizations are investing huge amounts of time and budget into better understanding their customer’s needs, wants and motivations. This, in turn, enables enhanced engagement with customers and ultimately increased revenues. Never has this focus been more current in the call center market.

The call center market has a huge advantage in its ability to develop insights.

Through the innovation and roll-out of new tools, it has never been easier or more efficient to generate valuable information and resolve issues. Although currently instant messaging, email and social media are the most common ways to connect, inevitably voice will soon become the “go to” way to communicate.

With a recent focus on developing new omni-channel strategies within the call center market, voice is becoming increasingly popular with speech and voice calls providing the richest density of data. A 2019 survey by leading call recording organisation Red Box, noted that “more than three quarters (76%) of senior IT executives [surveyed] indicated that they expected to have a ‘Voice First’ strategy in place within less than five years”. Voice holds “much more value than any other means of communication, with context, sentiment, intent, emotion and actions, providing real intelligence”.

Speech technology enables organizations to initiate digital transformation, which is vital to gaining key insights about their services and customers. Speech technology enhances the delivery of customer service, workforce management efficiencies, agent education and empowerment, and the ability to deploy advanced machine learning. Certainly a wake-up call for the 49% of companies surveyed that aren’t currently capturing conversations.

There are many use cases for effectively integrating speech technology in the call center market, so I thought I would delve into a few that we find are the most common.

Voice navigation

Traditional touch-tone navigation represents more of a maze than a menu for customers. Speech recognition technology enables keywords to be extracted and utilized in real-time to route the customer to the best available agent, team or source of information based on a single word. This personalization reduces the agent’s efforts to efficiently help customers and improve their overall experience.

The agent

Agents in call centers are the first touchpoint to your business, representing your brand, services and products to the end-user. Speech recognition technology makes it possible for call center managers to track, measure, and improve agent engagements. It can also provide agents with real-time metrics about customers’ feelings to further enhance their experience. Sentiment analysis can then be performed on the voice data to determine the customers’ mood and to establish which responses evoke positive and negative emotions based on the tone, pitch and frequency of their voice.

Knowledge base

Recording calls and converting them into text enables call centers to create an index of data for advanced searching of topics, themes and words. This data can be used to locate, replay, search and extract information in stored recordings for many uses. Growing a coherent knowledge base makes it possible to provide data-driven metrics to train, coach and empower agents to deliver excellent customer service.

Understanding

Omni-channel solutions can be attained by combining the insight held within voice with other text-based channels such as instant messaging, email and social media. Evaluating customer insights across all channels enable organizations to better analyze and identify potential areas of improvement, best practice, and to monitor compliance.

Concluding thoughts

Call centers utilizing speech recognition technology have a huge opportunity to unlock insights from call recordings and provide significant value to their customers and business. Understanding the customer voice and indeed sentiment helps to deliver key metrics on agent performance. By tracking success, you can help to motivate and empower agents to deliver great customer service and ultimately create a data-driven workforce.

Want to learn more about how Speechmatics can help you to transform your voice data into vital insights? Get in touch, we'd love to hear from you.