Voice analytics is one of the most massive revolutions in the call center industry – ever. You will hear it almost every time that you make a call to a contact center. It is often the first part of a call before you get connected to an agent, where you may have to tell a computer your name, date of birth, an identifying number, etc. The first thing that you may think is that it is an annoyance. However, that often depends on how well the software picks up what you are saying.  But, the question today is; what can voice analytics do for a company? We will look into this in a little more detail during this article. However, the first thing that you should note is that it is not always an annoyance; it does some good for the consumer, too. We already have various articles about what voice analytics is and how it works, so I will not go over those again. Instead, we will look at the benefits that you could gain by having voice analytics when compared to not having it. The benefits are the same whether you have a transcription service that turns speech into text before analysis, or if you are using a phonetic system that picks up the data in words without transcription. Therefore, during the rest of the article, those words are interchangeable, and often going to be called voice analytics as a collective.

How Voice Analytics Helps The Customer

As I have said, most people think that the computer voice that you speak to at the beginning of a call is nothing but a pain. The truth is that actually, it helps you more than you think. Call centers have changed massively in the past ten years or so. They have grown an enormous amount, with many sections of the call center dealing with different aspects of a call. If there were no voice analytics to see who you are and what your issue is, then you would likely be directed to the wrong department, thus need to be redirected. That would take a lot of your time, which is saved by the analytics. Furthermore, it will keep your sensitive information away from human ears, thus keeping your information safer. There are many other benefits to the customer, but they will be in the following sections. However, the article we are focusing on today is what voice analytics will do for a company, not an individual.

What Can Voice Analytics Do For A Company?

Customer experience is of the utmost importance, and that is especially true now that everyone has access to and uses the internet. One or two bad reviews that get a lot of traction somewhere like social media can completely ruin many years of dedication and brand building. The generalized truth is that people as a whole are much more likely to create a bad review than a positive one. And that leads us into the first thing that voice analytics will do to help a company.

Customer Experience

As I said earlier, people rarely see the computer voice at the beginning of a call as a good thing. However, as I also explained, it stops the need to be rerouted to various sections, it prevents your sensitive data from being heard, and it can also provide you with answers before even needing an agent. However, from a business perspective, voice analytics will identify any recurring requirements, trends, issues, etc., that customers may have. That means that the business can do more about those specific areas to help with customer satisfaction. For example, if a company that is selling a physical product receives a lot of phone calls all relating to a fault in the product, that can be passed to the design and development team for investigation and rectification. As another example, if you are selling a learning course and a lot of people are calling to ask about a specific section on that course, it could be rewritten as an amendment to provide a better customer experience. The list of what you can do to help with customer experience is endless.

Competition Analysis

In the same way that you gain an insight into what is wrong with a product, you can also identify features that your competitors are providing through general conversation by prospective customers. If you are selling a new product, then it is likely that people who are buying it will have done a little research into your competition. That means that when they call you, they may ask you if you have a specific feature, function, or ability in your service or product. If it is not something that you currently offer, and enough people ask about it, then you have a reason to implement it into your own service. That will have the benefit not only of gaining yourself more customers but having the edge over your competition by having your own features plus theirs.

Agent Evaluation

Agent evaluation is something that we already have many articles covering in more depth, such as training tips, coaching, and scorecards. Feel free to have a look through the blog posts to get more of an idea. However, there are two main areas that you can focus on that are relevant to your agents. They are:

• Identifying underperforming agents, where they are going wrong, and coaching them into higher performers.
• Seeing who are your top performers and rewarding them for their success. 

Having a more even selection of good agents will always help you to achieve better results, whether you are in sales or customer service. Therefore, it is vital that you use the voice analytics to gain a better insight into how well they are performing and help the agents that need it.

How Much Do They Help?

Of course, as you have read, all of these things will certainly help any business that has a call center. Furthermore, even if you only have a small business with one or two employees, they are tactics that you can employ to gain better results. The question is, how much does the reward outweigh the financial cost of voice analytics? The answer is a lot. A vast proportion (~84%) of all customers believe that the experience they have with customer service is as vital as the product itself. That is such a massive number that, if you were to have bad customer service, you could well only retain 16% of all of your customers. On the other end of the spectrum, though, if you already have poor customer service, and you increase it to great, you could increase your revenue by 5.25x. Furthermore, ~73% of all customers will regard your competition as better than you after they have only one bad customer experience. Again, that means that you could effectively lose 73% of all of your customers if they only have one bad experience, which could be caused by a single bad agent – that you could have noticed and coached if you had voice analytics. As if that wasn’t enough, 66% of all customers are also willing to pay a premium price on a service, providing that they receive a good experience when they need customer support. Therefore, you can increase your costs, retain more customers, and win more customers to your business from a competitor with a shoddy service. The problem is, though, that if you have a large call center, you may only find the issues if you have voice analytics, or a QA analyst listening to every call, all day.

What Customer Voice Analytics Can Do For A Company – Conclusion

Voice analytics is often regarded as an annoyance to the customer. However, I can almost guarantee all of you who think that way that you would feel worse without it. As for the companies themselves, you can reap the rewards by having voice analytics, if you use it correctly. Unfortunately, it is not something that you can pick up and do with no training. It is also something that will cost a lot of money for you to buy and train staff to use. Outsourcing is the single best way to get voice analytics into a business. If you would like to discuss what Call Criteria and our 10+ years of experience can do for you, please contact us.