Seizing the Power of Voice Analytics for QA & More

In a recent blog, I touched upon the idea that some Contact Center Operations have a negative impression of deploying automation in an environment where Customer Service is critical. The idea is that intercepting every customer interaction with a real human will automatically create a great experience for the customer, and presumably for the brand.

However, with most organizations’ sights on creating an exceptional customer experience, the rate at which many brands grow easily outpaces their ability to keep up. Gaining more customers typically results in more requests for support, information, or general knowledge.

Any service-based industry – ultimately, every organization is a service-based industry – will at some point or other be forced into deploying a level of automation to keep up with the demand.

As operations struggle to deal with the increased customer demands, the QA process is often the first shortcut taken when Contact Center operations grapple with the growing demand for services. In my opinion, taking this shortcut is a mistake.

As demands increase, the need for more focused Quality Assurance (QA) practices is no longer a luxury, but rather, a critical aspect of the overall operation. Your brand depends upon it and the focus on Customer Engagement demands it.

Regardless of the Operation’s desire to create a high-touch, personal experience by purposely avoiding any automation, there will come a point where automation will no longer be an option, but rather, a necessity.

Thankfully, Voice Analytics technology has come a long way and is dramatically giving Contact Center Operations the ability to further expand their QA processes through Automation. This is automation on the backside and is not a customer-facing process. We will address customer-facing automation in a future blog.

Today, I’d like to get you comfortable with the idea of automation and the impact automation can have on your overall Customer Experience strategy, which includes Agent efficiency and overall customer satisfaction.

Thinking about your own operation:

The answer to the above questions will vary widely from client to client, but I know most Contact Center operations are only processing a fraction of their interactions through a QA process. A fraction is only a subset of the actual work and cannot be relied upon as a complete model.

With the amount of work required to manage a contact center, we are always looking for ways to do more with less and having the ability to QA 100% of customer interactions just isn’t realistic within most Contact Center operations. At least from a human processing point of view.

But what if you could:

I would imagine Reporting and Dashboard Views of data is at the top of your list as a standard part of managing your contact center operation. I’ve yet to visit a Contact Center operation where the user would not appreciate better dashboards and more data.

If you’re not familiar with Voice Analytics software, it’s a technology that is easy to understand and is easily put into your daily practice. This is the type of automation that most Contact Center managers and QA analysts welcome, specifically for its ability to automate tasks, saving countless hours of time in assessing interactions and automating the overall QA process.

The simple answer:

Some voice analytics software also ingests SMS and WebChat conversations as well.

The key benefit of using voice analytics technology is:

Ultimately, for any Contact Center Director, Manager, Supervisor, QA Analyst, or Team Lead is the amount of time saved daily. What would normally take an individual hundreds of hours to listen to and/or read through client interactions, categorize, and “view” the interaction is done automatically, putting the critical data in front of the individual as a dashboard or report.

Most all Voice Analytics technology applications provide a dashboard for easily displaying key metrics, dialogue, sentiment, and much more. With voice analytics technology, users can automate the QA process, identify word usage, identify when agents do not include key phrases or compliance-based verbiage, isolate where customers or agents speak negative words, as examples, and this is just a sampling of what is possible.

Voice Analytics technology gives the user an immediate and clear vision of what is happening within the contact center, such as:

Voice Analytics has the power to automatically analyze 100% of customer interactions, exposing details of the customer experience and issues which would normally take a user many hours to complete for a fraction of customer interactions.

In our last blog, I mentioned 3 products with Voice Analytics and more in mind:

Let’s take a quick look at the UI for each application to help you become familiar with the idea of how Voice Analytics can offer your operation greater insight into details without consuming hours of your time.

While the process of automation as a customer-facing alternative may not fit every organization’s philosophical approach to customer service, there will come a time where Automation is the only option.

There are ways in which to strategically deploy Automation that can pay huge operational dividends. This provides a first-step process allowing clients to slowly move into automation, at their own pace.

With the focus on Customer Experience and Customer Loyalty, deploying Voice Analytics automation gives most all operations a tremendous advantage over QA, insight into the customer experience, and agent proficiency across 100% of interactions. Having this level of detail on every interaction paints a much broader and clearer picture of your overall performance in ways not easily accessible with older methods and technologies.

Once the operation becomes familiar with and understands the value of this level of automation, it becomes easier to envision where extending further automation makes the most sense.

With Artificial Intelligence, Bots, and machine learning advancements, the prospect of automation becomes more palatable across a wide array of possible options. Of course, every operation will want to first review its processes to identify and define a strategic pathway for automation, as a complement to the existing Contact Center operations and NOT as a replacement.

In our next blog, we will take a thirty thousand foot view of automation with the use of Bot technology to help you become familiar with its base structure.