Recorded calls between the agent and customer are the definitive representation of how business is being handled in the organization. Although hours and hours of these customer calls are being recorded, very few companies are leveraging the vast amount of business intelligence hidden in these audio files. Not making the most of this intelligence can cause companies to miss valuable opportunities to impact profitability, not to mention overall productivity. Speech analytics, when employed to quickly and easily search these massive audio files for relevant conversations, can translate to a deeper understanding of the business’ performance.

The value of speech analytics can be demonstrated by measured and improved performance in three major areas.

Operational Efficiency

Companies are constantly striving to improve efficiencies that will reduce costs, save time and increase productivity, without sacrificing quality of service. By accurately identifying and analyzing call types that can be a threat to efficiency – such as finding the root causes of habitual callers – processes and resources have the opportunity to be realigned to be more effective.

Case in Point: Through anecdotal evidence from their service agents, an energy utility company theorized that agents were spending an inordinate amount of time servicing customers who called in more than once a month. Realizing that this was an inefficient use of the contact center, the company needed a way to rapidly navigate thousands of hours of recorded conversations to first identify the repeat callers, and then to determine the issues causing them to call multiple times.

By analyzing the content of these repeat calls, several common causes were uncovered: 1) billing cycle issues; 2) outstanding service orders; and 3) confusing collections policies.

Based on this insight, the company was able to formulate several changes to their processes and procedures. These new ideas were then implemented, such as revising billing cycle dates to reflect customers’ payroll dates, providing clear guidelines on billing extensions and coaching agents on how to close out payment calls instead of advising the customer to call back to confirm payment receipt.

As a result of the changes enabled by speech analytics, the company is able to save money in the annualized costs associated with the repeat call activity and increase agent productivity through improved procedures.

Business Intelligence & Market Research

It’s important for businesses to recognize the full potential of speech analytics technology. Companies often spend a sizable portion of their marketing budget on research tools. Because many of these methods take place in an artificial environment, the compiled results are often random, incomplete and even inaccurate. But if this feedback is properly categorized, analyzed and combined with customer conversations captured during the normal course of business, speech analytics can produce real market intelligence.

Case in Point: One of the largest retail organizations in the world continually introduces new products, so successful market introduction is key to continued brand growth and market share.

Launching these new products creates increased in-bound consumer communication in the form of calls into consumer hotlines. Mining the information from these calls can take weeks if done manually, which impacts the organizations’ ability to respond quickly to this information. Rapid response to the feedback is critical so that product changes can be implemented without compromising release schedules.

Nexidia was used to categorize product issues, delivering key intelligence from the company’s audio data every single day, giving the company the ability to react to marketplace adoption and product questions quickly. The intelligence derived from their audio files highlighted two very important issues:

• Consumers were not using a product per the directions, resulting in an increase in calls noting adverse side effects; and
• New packaging was difficult to open and was proving problematic for some people.

This insight was used to make timely product improvements and avoid further liability.

Quality of Customer Interactions

Customer experience has become a buzzword, and for good reason. Customers are much more discerning and demanding with regard to price, product and quality of service than ever before. They expect to have product issues handled promptly and professionally.

Many methods can be used to measure customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and customer retention, but unless the company can effectively search for and analyze the actual conversations with customers, they will be left guessing about the accuracy of their customer service levels. Speech analytics is an opportunity to better align customer expectations with business goals.

Case in Point: Nexidia’s primary goal in working with a national healthcare provider was to identify and select calls relevant to case investigation. The secondary objective was to begin to select and monitor key indicators of customer satisfaction.

Case identification was first approached using Nexidia Forensic Search to categorize call subject matter and correlate this with customer ID to quickly return the calls of interest. Customer satisfaction analysis followed quickly as call subject matter was immediately converted to ongoing searches and automated reporting within Nexidia.

With Forensic Search delivering efficient, fast and accurate results to the case manager, case identification became less burdensome. Continuous monitoring of key customer satisfaction had many points of impact including:

• Proactive reporting on possible customer service problems;
• Agent-level analysis of how customers are being serviced to include knowledge assessment and coaching;
• Market intelligence indicating customer confusion/lack of knowledge on healthcare changes and eligibility.

At the End of the Day

Speech analytics is a solution that should be used to leverage the audio assets a company already has. Digging into these day-to-day interactions is key to uncovering valuable data that can be used to better understand a company’s overall performance. With the assistance of this technology, companies will see real benefits in the form of improved efficiencies, properly categorized and analyzed recorded data and a more positive customer experience.

The Nexidia Technology

Nexidia is the developer and provider of the only phonetic-based audio/video search technology for speech analytics solutions. Corporations have a tremendous amount of information locked away in their audio files – hidden data that can make a positive impact on their business. The benefits of implementing Nexidia’s technology can be felt throughout the organization, starting at the contact center.

More Accurate, Faster, Scalable

To address the complexities of audio search, Nexidia developed Phonetic Audio Search, based on the use of phonemes. Phonemes allow the technology to be highly accurate, very fast and much more scalable than alternate technology such as speech-to-text.

Users can view the results in a variety of ways in order to get a multidimensional look at the intelligence contained in the audio files and easily drill down and listen to the original calls generating these results.

Nexidia Enterprise Speech Intelligence (ESI) is highly efficient when searching audio archives for instances of individual words and simple phrases in a wide range of languages. Nexidia also provides the ability to create deeply focused searches that find more contextually relevant results.

Nexidia’s phonetic-based technology provides the best method to find the business intelligence that is inside the audio files of countless businesses. Knowing that this information can positively impact the business is the first step; finding it and applying it to improve process and organizational goals can result in significant return on investment. This is why speech analytics is one of the fastest growing, highly impactful developments in customer relationship management.