Speech analytics is a game-changer that is quietly having a dramatic impact on call centers and customer service operations that are leveraging it.
Southwest Credit Systems L.P. is just one example of modern speech analytics in action and the benefits it can bring.
Southwest Credit is a national provider of Accounts Receivables Management (ARM (News - Alert)) services to small and large companies in the communications, education, utility and financial services industries. As with most other ARM providers, new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) rules have made it increasingly challenging for Southwest Credit. The new rules require that firms prove that policies are being adhered to, in addition to supplying well documented improvement strategies when non-conformity is found.
The solution for Southwest Credit has been CallMiner (News - Alert) speech analytics.
Prior to speech analytics, Southwest Credit’s quality assurance procedure was a 32-point scorecard and seven agent audits per month, with the results shared via executive level reports. This process meant that less than 5 percent of calls were monitored, however, meaning it did not have a statistically valid sample size for audit and enforcement purposes.
With speech analytics in place, however, the company now captures 100 percent of its calls, with accuracy in the 90 to 95 percent range that they had with their old manual audit procedure.
Analytics not only capture more calls, it also lets the company create search strings to locate all calls that fit a certain criteria. This has been particularly helpful in discovering what language and patterns lead to escalation.
By having a constant, automated finger on the pulse of its agent interactions, Southwest Credit also now is able to deliver scorecards and reports on a weekly and monthly basis that highlight what actions can be taken to improve agent overall quality scores.
From this, the company also is able to identify underperforming agents and better train new hires in the language and procedures that work best.
Overall, Southwest Credit has found that CallMiner’s speech analytics solutions have reduced call escalation by a marked 66 percent. Regulatory complaints have also dropped by 32 percent, a key metric for any ARM provider. This shows both the power of modern speech analytics in general, and the effectiveness of CallMiner’s solution in particular.
CallMiner is a leading cloud-based conversational analytics solution for improving agent performance across all contact channels, including voice, social, e-mail and chat. Its CallMiner Eureka solution pushes actionable insights directly to the people who need and can act on the data, and it captures customer conversations and associated metadata from any source, whether call system, recorder or chat systems. It converts customer interactions into a consistent format for analysis, automatically evaluates every contact for sentiment/acoustics, categorization, and performance scoring, and allows for freeform search to find and play back contacts containing certain words and phrases or sharing other characteristics. It also lets companies evaluate and compare performance and key metrics using data visualization, and help determine the root cause of issues through auto-topic analysis and automatically identifying outliers.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson