Every single time your customers pick up the phone, you’re presented with an opportunity to unearth a goldmine of data. For example, you can discover what matters to them, what motivates to purchase, and most importantly, why they’ve chosen to speak to you to meet those needs.
This type of information can only come from one source, speech analytics. The benefits of speech analytics are vast and can be applied across every level of your business, including your contact centre operations. Using calls to harvest customer insight can have real impact, enabling you to do things such as tailor agent scripts or improve your upselling.
In the blog, we’ll explore what speech analytics are, how you can use speech analytics, and the top benefits of using speech analytics in your contact centre.
Before we dive into the benefits of speech analytics, what is speech analytics in contact centres? Speech analytics involves monitoring, analysing and extract data from customer calls, using a specific type of software.
In a consumer landscape filled with fleeting and anonymous digital touchpoints, and multi-channel marketing campaigns bringing in leads from all directions, calls are one of the most direct engagements you’ll have with your customer. This makes it a vital opportunity to extract valuable data that can positively impact your next call, and your next, and your next.
Speech analytics can help you answer questions such as:
For contact centres, implementing call monitoring and speech analytics into your operations can help you extract insights at scale, tracking every call in and out effortlessly.
We’ve established what speech analytics are, now it’s time to see what they can do. Here are just a handful of the benefits that speech analytics can offer your contact centre, as well as your wider business.
Collecting data on how to influence more successful outcomes is the perfect way to train agents faster. With Conversation Analytics and Agent ID, you can evaluate how engaging the calls coming in, and going out, of your contact centre are.
You can uncover the best calls to use for training, rapidly upskill your teams and decrease average handling time, all while increasing conversion rates and ensuring that your customers are truly satisfied, without increasing waiting times and potentially missing opportunities.
Your call centres handle hundreds, if not thousands of calls every day. Use customer intel to handle enquiries faster, minimising wait time and reducing the overall pressure on your call agents. Detailed intel into customer conversations can be used to minimise wait time and reduce pressure on your call centre teams by deflecting calls efficiently.
With customer data at your fingertips, you’ll be able to solve and even pre-empt issues before they even pick up the phone. Handling minor queries elsewhere ensures your contact centres are focused on handling calls that are more likely to generate higher order values. This means you can more effectively make space for the calls that matter.
Monitor and identify the keywords that trigger customer conversions and use these to optimise your sales scripts. If you’re able to identify keywords that drive call outcomes you’re most interested in, you can test scripts and adjust wording to increase conversion rate.
Plus, you can create upselling and cross-selling strategies that are proven to drive results. For example, rather than saying ‘would you like to upgrade to first class?’ you might find ‘would you like more legroom?’ to be a more persuasive call-to-action.
Satisfying your customers and understanding what makes them tick is the best way of surprising and delighting them. Call intelligence software can monitor conversations to flag keywords or trends before you’re even aware of them and tie these trends to positive or negative call outcomes, so you know what to do more, or less of.
You can pinpoint those golden words and phrases that transform hesitant callers into happy customers, so you can get intelligent with how you train your agents. Plus, you’re better equipped to perfect your objection handling techniques, using customer intel to create scripts that will help almost guarantee conversion and upselling.
Speech analytics can make your business more responsive, based on real consumer insight. Access Self Storage, one of the UK’s largest and fastest growing self-storage companies, understood that during the pandemic many people’s plans changed, as did their storage needs. To keep costs and wait times down for customers, they needed to understand how to handle calls more efficiently.
They used Conversation Analytics to extract insights that helped them update processes, scripts and training. This practice was crucial in reacting to the changing needs of customers, and for answering the many new questions that the pandemic posed such as:
Using Infinity’s suite of tools, they saw a 50% reduction in external contact centre costs, a 23% year-on-year boost in calls from offline marketing activity, and an incredible 35% year-on-year increase in converting calls.
Speech analytics can make your customers happier and reduce your acquisition costs. For Pendragon, a UK-based automotive dealership group, they wanted to drive significant change across their business by truly understanding what their customers wanted.
Every day, they received thousands of calls across its network of brands and dealerships. At this scale, every improvement on these conversations is significant, but without knowing what happens on those calls, it’s difficult to make such improvements. They felt they were missing opportunities and needed a solution.
Using Conversation Analytics, they were able to pinpoint every call where key terms were used, along with additional clarifiers like where in the call they were spoken, or their proximity to other terms. Some of the challenges addressed by Conversation Analytics within the first three months included:
Working with Infinity, Pendragon were able to drive a 63% reduction in cost per acquisition, increase sales and service calls by 12% and reduce common friction points across their major branches by 66%.
A common challenge for call centres is the ability to extract customer insights from each and every phone call at scale. With Infinity’s Speech analytics suite, Conversation Analytics, this is no longer a problem. Conversation Analytics can surface hidden insights, highlight topics and keywords, and analyse sentiment in every call.
With Conversation Analytics, you can evolve your tactics based on real data from your customers. Being able to identify the finer points of conversation quickly and easily using call categorisation gives you the context and nuance that can be difficult to track when you’re handling high volumes of calls.
When you put Conversation Analytics and Agent ID together, things get even more interesting. You can gain actionable insights in to how engaging the calls coming in, and going out, of your contact centre are. You can uncover the best calls to use for training, rapidly upskill your teams and decrease average handling time, all while increasing conversion rates and ensuring that your customers are truly satisfied.
Want to find out more about how to take your contact centre to the next level? Start a conversation with us today about Agent ID and Conversation Analytics.