If the call center is a sports car, then agent performance is the engine revving every time a customer calls in. There’s so much to consider when it comes to implementing best practices for delivering innovative, positive and customer engaging performance, and it’s vital that they are not only understood, but applied.
When it comes to empowering your contact center agents, the first thing you need to ensure you’re doing as a contact center manager is delivering the necessary feedback directly to your employees. But how can you guarantee you’re getting the freshest, most thorough insight into customer interactions and calls to relay this back to those who are handling them? A recent study by IT research and analysis firm, Aberdeen (News - Alert), shows that 41 percent of the highest performing contact centers provide agents with timely and relevant speech analytics insights.
In light of this, I was able to speak with Jason Napierski, product marketing manager at CallMiner (News - Alert), a leading speech analytics solutions provider, on what you can do today to increase such things as greater operational efficiency and overall CRM intelligent strategies in the contact center by relying on this technology.
Napierski is no stranger to this topic, either. In a separate article tackling this subject head on, he wrote, “It is no secret that excellent customer service is the key to increased business and revenue. In order to provide that service, contact centers need to be staffed with helpful and knowledgeable agents. Improving agent performance, however, continues to be a challenge for many companies.”
There are primarily two notable challenges when it comes to improving agent performance:
Sitting down and listening to a random sample of calls to pinpoint areas of struggle can take hours or even days. This method of analyzing calls “has a lot of shortcomings,” according to Napierski, and even then, doing this manually does not ensure that the desired feedback has been gained, and thus distributed to those who need it most – your agents.
- Oftentimes inaccurate or untimely results
Even when you get through with analyzing your recordings, results are unfortunately oftentimes inaccurate. “Usually results are inaccurate due to sampling bias and [perhaps even] reviewer subjectivity,” he notes. “If you have one person reviewing instead of the agents, they may score the call differently than another analyst or supervisor.”
Even more, when you do get the results you’re looking for, usually, it’s much farther down the road (say, months later), which at that point, doesn’t help contribute much to the overall improvement of that specific error made.
In other words, you need real-time insights to make real improvements in agent performance, and this is where speech analytics comes into play.
Conversely, speech analytics can help solve these two issues by:
- Taking all of the work out for you
With a speech analytics solution in place, there’s no need for manual labor or choosing a random sample of calls to analyze, as the technology does it all for you. “Speech analytics listens to 100 percent of calls,” Napierski explains. “There are no more outliers, there’s no more sampling bias.” Even more, since the analysis is now being conducted technologically, you won’t ever have to risk reviewer subjectivity. You get the feedback you need, when you need it and how you need it – it really is that easy.
- Results are always effective, actionable and impacting
“Scoring 100 percent of phone calls also eliminates the inaccuracies introduced with sampling and appropriately dilutes anomalies that are not a good representation of an agent’s performance. Removing the manual processes and people associated with the evaluation means that feedback is much faster and more efficient,” Napierski wrote in said mentioned article. As discussed above, with speech analytics, your results are much more timely – and therefore, relevant to the situation – thus making a significantly larger impact on improving agent performance in the contact center, and ultimately, improving your customers’ perspective and overall experience.
Edited by Allison Boccamazzo