Great idea for a column from Call Center Helper: Ask six experts what the best return on investment is from implementing speech analytics in contact centers.
Reducing avoidable contact: As told by Craig Pumfrey, director of Marketing & Communications, NICE Systems (News - Alert) EMEA, a service center project created search parameters to automatically “listen” for words and phrases in every inbound customer call that could be used during an avoidable contact, such as “parking fine” or “I called last week.” These interactions were then indexed and checked against the set parameters and wherever a match was found the call was flagged for the team to review the reason for the enquiry.
Deployment methods: According to Duncan White, managing director, horizon2, the potential of speech analytics is not being realized because the return on investment is generally not compelling enough. The main problem is that speech analytics is being promoted as a discrete technology within the contact center or customer operations environment rather than a strategic enabler at an organizational level. Deployed in the right way, speech analytics should be used to re-engineer core processes such as quality management. Use speech analytics in a supporting role for organizational change .
Compliance: Lee Jones, chief operating officer of Red Box Recorders (News - Alert), says perhaps the most powerful ROI is regarding the issue of compliance, because ROI can be proven through the avoidance of or reduction in litigation, damages and regulatory fines, viewed against the cost of the solution. Any significant reduction in fines could pay for a speech analytics solution many times over. Quite simply, speech analytics can offer call center operations quick and significant ROI by giving their managers easy access to call recordings that can be used to evaluate service levels, ensure compliance or address customer concerns.
Revenue generation: Jonathan Wax, vice president EMEA, Nexidia (News - Alert), believes principally it is about revenue generation and protection, or cost reduction. Cost reduction includes reducing average handle time (AHT) on specific call types or processes; reducing call-backs by understanding the drivers of repeat calls -- thereby improving first-call resolution rates; reducing the cost of quality assurance and compliance checking while also providing the ability to scale the process to monitor 100 percent of calls.
Live speech analytics: Karen Jones, marketing manager, GemaTech, says achieving consistent compliance is high on the agenda of most regulated organizations due to the increasing risk of crippling financial penalties. New live, on-call, speech analytics technology can enable such organizations to minimize their risk while increasing operational efficiencies and improving quality assurance. Not only are calls now recorded for compliance purposes, but every call is monitored and analyzed automatically so that cases of non-compliance are instantly highlighted to both agent and supervisor, providing the ability to address the issue before the call is finished.
Problem isolation: According to Helen Murray, director, Verint (News - Alert) Consulting, speech analytics helps organizations analyze calls to identify the reasons why customers are unhappy, or wish to switch providers. This helps identify where to improve internal processes, for example, that may have dissatisfied customers, where to make offers or conversely where to avoid panic discounting that erodes margins. It also helps them more accurately model churn rates.
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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.Edited by Tammy Wolf