As customer experience continues to be the prime focus of today’s successful businesses, the importance of contact centers simply cannot be denied. And the best way to ensure a contact center is providing the right experience and yielding the best results is through its agents. Contact center agents are often the first connections customers make with a company, and the ensuing interactions can determine whether or not said customer will do business with them again, or if they will go to the competition. In fact, a recent survey showed that just one bad experience would stop 86% of people from doing business with a company. So it should go without saying that well-trained, proficient agents are invaluable to a business.
Yet even with this knowledge, many companies still find themselves struggling to achieve the agent performance they desire, thus not delivering an exceptional customer experience. They’re putting in the effort, so where are the results? Perhaps the problem is not how much time and money they are investing, but what they are investing it in. By not focusing on the correct factors, a company can do more harm than good to its contact center agents. But re-prioritizing just a few aspects can make a tremendous difference.
2 Ways Speech Analytics Helps Provide Excellent Customer Experiences:
1. Ensure Calls are Handled Efficiently and Accurately
Contact centers tend to encourage their agents to handle calls quickly in order to save money. The problem that often occurs with this mindset is just because a call is handled fast, it doesn’t mean it’s handled right. Simply rushing through a call can lead to frustrated customers and repeat callers. Or worse, it can lead to customers not calling back, at all. Not because their problem has been fixed, but because they doubt the agent can actually help them (or even wants to). This silence on the customer’s end is actually scarier than if they called back angry with an agent, because studies show 67% of unhappy customers won’t voice their complaints to a company; they’ll simply leave, and most likely share their experience with another people. In other words, companies who employee this “get it done fast” method most likely aren’t saving money – they’re losing it!
But does this mean efficiency should be completely abandoned by contact centers? Not at all. With long hold times being a key source of aggravation for many callers, spending too much time with just one caller can have catastrophic effects (think of the “Show Me the Money!” scene from Jerry Maguire). The key is in making sure agents can handle calls that come in both quickly AND correctly. This can be achieved by implementing call mining software such as speech analytics to help develop methods for situations that actually work. A report from Cisco shows first call resolutions are raised 4 to 13% when companies use innovative analytical and reporting technologies. Agents who are familiar with common issues and the best ways to handle them can not only ensure calls are handled in a timely manner, but that the customer hangs up feeling reassured and confident in a company’s capabilities. And this confidence means a far better chance of a loyal customer for life.
2. Make Sure Training is Up to Date
Most contact centers have training manuals for their agents, often filled with FAQ sections to help agents know how to deal with common questions or issues that may arise. While this is certainly useful, the trouble comes in having it become obsolete. Customers’ expectations and preferences are often changing, so it is futile to take for granted that a strategy that worked in the past will always work in the present and the future. If an agent is unwittingly employing outdated and stagnant methods to address a problem, they may find themselves wondering why they are not getting the predicted outcomes. As a result, they can become frustrated and jaded when nothing seems to work – an attitude that can often come across to the customer, thus ruining the customer experience.
However, utilizing speech analytics to delve into the phone conversations occurring between agents and customers can help provide in-depth insights into what customers really want. By scanning all conversations to detect trends and patterns, speech analytics can take unstructured data and convert it into actionable business insights, allowing companies to develop improved processes that truly satisfy their customers. After all, by truly listening to what is being said in these conversations, companies can hear the true voice of the customer. And by using speech analytics periodically, companies can ensure they are always up to date with making their customers happy, and giving their agents more confidence in their skills.
It’s no surprise that 62% of today’s businesses view the experience a customer receives during a phone conversation as something to set them apart from the competition. With the right training and speech analytics, any contact center can help its agents achieve and even excel its customer experience goals.
Learn more about CallFinder’s affordable cloud-based speech analytics technology and how we can help your business use speech analytics to provide excellent customer experiences. Call us at 1-800-639-1700.
Sources:
-86% of consumers say one bad experience would stop them from doing business with a company (http://customerthink.com/running-a-call-center-with-the-customer-in-mind/
-67% of unhappy customers won’t voice their complaints to the company; they’ll just leave (and share their unhappy story with people) (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vala-afshar/50-important-customer-exp_b_8295772.html)
-62% of businesses perceive the experience a customer receives during a phone conversation as something to set them apart from the competition (https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/operations/articles/2013-global-contact-center-survey.html)
