3 Specific Ways Voice Analytics Can Improve the Customer Journey

by | Dec 2, 2019 | Cloud Software

When business leaders think about the customer journey (and the experiences that surround them), it’s tempting to envision a process where they’re behind the wheel, driving engagement.

But now more than ever, forward-thinking organizations are trusting the voice of their customers to guide their own journeys through voice analytics.

As technology and innovation improve, voice analytics helps organizations truly hear, understand and interact with customers in a more personalized manner. 

In addition to easily reducing QA/QM team size and scalability costs, voice analytics offers other immediate benefits for a typical call center organization, including: 

  • Elevating live caller experiences.
  • Mining voice data for better customer messaging.
  • Identifying gaps in your customer journey.

As more companies focus on strategies that deliver game-changing customer experiences, voice analytics will command greater attention in three key ways.

Here’s how voice analytics is driving improved experiences across the customer journey and providing visibility into the future of customer experiences:

Two-way sentiment analysis

Most organizations struggle to get a clear view of their customer’s sentiment across engagements — this is doubly true with agents, whose job is to offer peerless service without ever tipping their hand that they’re struggling. 

Across difficult interactions, voice analytics helps mine call data to evolve long-term processes and outcomes — no matter how difficult the challenge. 

Historically, the ability to understand the true sentiments of both parties came down to surveys and focus groups, which only offered a small sample of a much larger group.

Worse yet, it was an insight that was only available AFTER the fact.

Now, with voice analytics technology becoming more common, organizations are able to tap into a variety of real-time advantages:

  • Identify how particular agents, call durations, or conversation keywords impact the customer experience.
  • Respond proactively to recent changes to customer or agent sentiment.
  • Pinpoint QA/QM resources to areas that need their attention rather than listening in on every call.
  • Faster implementation of new best practices. 

Consider a FAQ which is consistently resolved positively once three recurring steps are taken: by collecting that data via sentiment analysis, your QA/QM teams can standardize that response with those three steps plotted out in advance. 

By trusting voice analytics, organizations can rely less on manual oversight, like call monitoring, and free more resources to improve other areas of your service.

Consistent and accurate transcription

Call center QA/QM teams are tasked with gleaning useful insights from a library of customer-agent interactions. Previously, without the tools in place, a lot of manual work went into understanding the customer engagement, transcribing a large volume of voice call data. 

But now, with a voice analytics system built for call centers, speech-to-text transcribing is easily automated and scaled, offering useful data sets with limited word-to-error rates for growing organizations. 

Voice analytics transcription is perfect for:

  • Global organizations with high call volumes and customer interactions
  • Call center leaders managing nearshore, offshore and distributed teams.
  • Companies that leverage data from multiple digital sources to drive customer insights for better business decisions
  • Compliance-heavy companies that need to identify potential calls that may result in risk and flag them for quick follow up

If you want the benefits of seamless transcription, there are a number of quality vendors that make it simple to mine call data to improve the customer experience.  By mining this data you can then take the transcriptions and turn them into actionable insights.

Live agent feedback to elevate caller experience

In something out of a science fiction novel, voice analytics is even bridging its way into real-time insights for better agent performance. 

Many voice analytics solutions can equip agents with a call checklist to monitor real-time customer stress and even warn against speaking over a customer. These cues serve to train the agent as they perform and result in better customer service at every stage.

Add to that, voice analytics can easily integrate with existing CRM data which can be populated in much the same way.

Consider this example: your agent is on a call with a customer and the voice analytics dashboard is reporting they’re becoming increasingly frustrated. Your agent sees this is the fifth call in two months, with an average call duration of NINE MINUTES! 

Empowered with this information, agents can enrich engagements with more human connections that reduce stress and elevate outcomes.

“Thanks for your patience, I see you’ve called a number of times recently. I want to resolve your issue as fast as possible — would it be okay if I called you back once I have an answer to your question, so I don’t have to keep you on the phone?”

Whatever their answer, offering customers empathy and personalized service will always be appreciated and (often) will breed loyalty.

Please keep in mind that live voice analytics is not necessarily for everyone. Depending on your current technology stack it may not even be possible without first updating some of your current technologies, like moving your mono-voice phone system to a new cloud-based stereo option.  Live analytics solutions are also very heavy on computing needs, so the market costs have not come down to a level that everyone can afford. These are all things that an expert can help you work through.

Start Talking About a Better Customer Journey with Voice Analytics

If you want to reach customers and elevate their overall experience, then you should be investing in voice analytics sooner rather than later. By utilizing natural language processing (NLP) and AI elements, your organization will get full context and clarity into your customer’s sentiment. 

And beyond just monitoring what customers say, voice analytics helps your organization train and improve the effectiveness of your organization’s customer service.

Ask yourself if your organization could benefit from sentiment analysis, customer call transcription and live agent feedback — and then take the next step to giving your customers a better journey.

Want to see how a cloud-based call center solution can infuse your customer service with voice analytics fast? Let Cloud Call Center Search and our collection of industry experts find a vendor partner that is an exact fit for your needs. Just fill out the form for a free consultation.