A recent Webinar, entitled “Using Speech Analytics to Improve Contact Center Quality Measurement,” was presented by TMC (News - Alert) and speech analytics leader UTOPY.
Contact center quality assessment traditionally has had two major challenges, Webinar officials said: sample size and criteria objectivity. The Webinar showed how speech analytics can help with both of these challenges by evaluating every interaction each agent has with a customer, and using “standardized definitions to measure behaviors that can be objectively defined in terms of what agents actually say during calls.”
Presenting was Michael Miller, vice president, Customer Strategy for UTOPY (News - Alert). Miller is responsible for customer strategy, pre-and-post-sales support, and operational consulting at UTOPY, a customer interaction analytics provider.
As Miller noted in the presentation, any agent skill that can be defined in behavioral terms can be measured by speech analytics, thereby eliminating subjectivity, and speech analytics can evaluate at a quite granular level, improving the precision of measurement.
Miller explained how speech analytics, if used correctly, define the agent skills that a company wants to measure. Since we all know that you can’t improve what you can’t measure, being able to measure agent skills means you can improve them. Speech analytics helps with this, automatically measuring agent performance in ways not possible with traditional methods.
Miller noted the importance of the 100 percent sample provided by the ability to analyze every agent interaction. As he said during the Webinar, typically agents are evaluated on, at most, a handful of calls, which may or may not give an accurate picture of their overall performance -- “You caught me on a bad day, this is not a fair process” Miller said to describe a possible scenario. “Freezing the process in ambiguity,” is a very real hazard of this method, not to mention how costly and time-intensive it can be.
Speech analytics are also be used to identify revenue opportunities missed by traditional quality methods. Miller showed how they were used by two companies in different industries to improve the precision of call quality assessment.
To hear the webinar in its entirety, click here to download the archived version.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.