How AI-Powered Speech Analytics Can Optimize Human Efficiency at Customer Contact Centres
By Sreenivas Gudavalli, Chief Technology Officer, Provana
Today, speech analytics is harnessed across industries and is no longer confined to being just a conversation transcription tool. With advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) over the years, speech analytics has evolved into a powerful tool that can break through data silos, providing accurate real-time actionable insights to businesses and human customer service agents. However, with customers’ desire for value-driven, personalized, contextual, and sympathetic engagements across their preferred channels, the significance of the human voice in delivering a seamless CX cannot be understated. Hence as call volumes continue to grow, AI-powered speech analytics is poised to be a game-changer – enabling faster turnaround time for resolving customer queries.
Turning speech into actionalable data and insights
AI-powered speech analytics can help businesses grow and strengthen their long-term relationships with customers. During a live customer engagement call, the human voice can reveal a wealth of information that would otherwise be difficult to gauge through written text alone. Contact centres can use these pieces of information to extract data points such as customer sentiment, tonality, keywords, phrases, and call time and create a comprehensive database mapping actionable insight. Through this data, businesses can better understand customer pain points, enabling them to realign their strategy to deliver seamless customer experiences and improve brand loyalty.
More intelligent allocation of customer service agents
Speech analytics can streamline insights about customers while identifying high-performing human agents. As a result, customer support agencies can use data insights to improve segmentation and resource allocation for a specific customer query in order to optimize human efficiency and enable faster resolution of critical customer queries. Categorizing this call data is essential for bolstering agent performance and identifying repetitive client inquiries.
Training and upskilling the future CX support workforce
With all recorded conversations being instantly examined by speech analytics to discover particular words and phrases, these words and phrases can be automatically sorted and categorized to show where an agent is succeeding and where they need some improvisation. Speech analytics is also a great way to ensure script conformity, imperative in several businesses. Another option to improve agent training is to use automated call scoring. Agents in contact centres are more likely to succeed if they are provided detailed feedback on their work. Each conversation is scored based on a predetermined set of measures, allowing agents to see their strengths and weaknesses.
Promoting data privacy
During a call, customers may be required to share sensitive personal information such as citizen identification numbers, credit card details, residential addresses, etc. As the onus of safeguarding the sensitive data of millions of customers rests with the contact centres, AI-enabled speech analytics can help mitigate risk associated with handling sensitive consumer details. With advanced speech tools, businesses can correctly anonymize, store, or delete any sensitive information from call recordings and transcripts, rendering it inaccessible for misuse.
Speech analytics will undoubtedly increase corporate efficiency, agent performance, and customer satisfaction scores. However, the need of the hour is to optimize how the data is generated through agent-customer interactions and to identify patterns and metrics that can enable business growth at large. Over the years, with AI and speech analytics rapidly advancing, there are infinite possibilities for extracting and decoding customers’ behavioural patterns, leading to more actionable insights that streamline compliance management and enhance customer engagement.
