Speech Analytics for service calls
Speech Analytics has many different applications and benefits, including assisting with service or support related calls.
While sales calls may be a focus for most businesses, having an optimised service or support function can go a long way to ensuring customers are kept happy, increasing their likelihood of remaining as customers. Part of having an optimised service or support function is minimising the number of support calls/queries received, or reducing the waiting time for customers to receive a response.
Speech Analytics can help you optimise your support function by:
Identifying support issues
Speech Analytics can help identify critical issues that need urgent attention compared to standard support issues by scanning for specific keywords related to urgent or critical issues. This data can then be fed back to engineering teams who can help fix the issue.
It can also assist in identifying the main reasons customers are calling by analysing calls at the end of each day or the end of every week to find trends in support issues.
This can assist a number of teams in the business:
- Support teams can use this information to create self-help content so customers can resolve their own queries without the need to call. This frees up the support agent’s time to assist with other queries.
- Marketing teams can broadcast the self-help content through various channels – website, blog, EDM – to help better educate customers.
- Engineering and development teams can use the information to improve the product and features.
Reducing support ticket handling time
Generally, a support agent answering a call will be required to categorise the support issue they are dealing with from a pre-defined list in their CRM. For example, a caller might call about a fault with their TV and therefore it will be defined as ‘Fault’.
Speech Analytics can help categorise calls automatically without the need for agents to do this manually, by scanning the call for keywords related to specific categories. By making this process automated, it may reduce operational costs as agents will be more efficient and able to answer more calls.
Identifying service calls more accurately
When it comes to identifying the type of service calls, most CRM systems only allow agents to select the most relevant call driver from a pre-defined list. However, a call may have multiple drivers – e.g. customer initially called for support, but then had billing enquiries.
Also, an agent’s manual input could be inaccurate due to user error or inconsistency. Emotional effects could also be a factor, where a customer’s call driver may be of a support nature, but if the conversation is affected by the customer’s frustration, it could lead to an agent selecting customer complaint as the call driver.
Speech analytics can be configured to provide multiple and accurate call drivers, as well as assigning the value or percentages of the different call drivers. For example, it can determine what percentage of the call related to support or sales.
Chat bots require a strong knowledgebase to be able to operate and provide responses to customers that are accurate.
Speech Analytics can help build a knowledge base by taking information received from callers and using this to build topics and discussion points which can then also be used to power chat bots.
This way, the knowledge base/chat bots are being populated with not only real customer queries, but also real and accurate answers provided by your support team.