Blog - News

Jul 14, 2020 | Read time 4 min

Preserve contact interaction history to improve customer experience

Voice technology empowers contact center agents to improve their customer experience by displaying customer's interaction history in real-time.
Good customer experience is in everyone's interest

Contact center agents are under pressure to ensure every customer they speak to has the best customer experience. But all too often the reality falls short of the standards everyone is striving for – and that has a direct impact on revenues.

According to research from Magnetic North, 71% of customers would consider moving to a competitor if they had to repeat their query to multiple contact center agents. The research also revealed that 32% of customers would go to a competitor immediately if a business did not meet their expectations for response times.

How maintaining contact interaction history makes a difference

Customers find it frustrating when they're asked to repeat information each time they speak to a different contact center agent. They are left with the negative impression that the agent doesn’t know enough about them or their contact history with the company. It wastes time and diminishes agent productivity.

The problem is even worse if the customer is ringing with a complaint – the situation can easily escalate if their call is answered by an agent with no access to their call log history.

Advanced analytics are key to unlocking call log history

Empowering agents to do their jobs better by equipping them with insightful data is key to providing great customer experience in the contact center. Voice technology has a crucial role to play in this – unlocking voice data captured in call recordings to equip agents to improve their customer service.

Contact centers capture billions of hours of voice data each year. But the value of this call log history is limited without accurate transcription to access it. The customer on the end of the phone will get frustrated having to repeat their issue and is not going to wait while you listen back to their previous calls.

Voice technology supports agents

Speech-to-text technology supports agents by delivering a transcript of calls in real-time – or transcripts of previous interactions – direct to their dashboards.

Contact centers can significantly accelerate resolution times by making customer interaction history accessible to agents. In the event of a dispute, providing agents with a transcript of the contact history in real-time eliminates the requirement of the quality assurance (QA) team to filter through and locate the dispute in call recordings.

Call transcriptions enable agents to better understand a customer’s previous engagement and lets calls to be indexed and searched with minimal human effort. Transcribed calls enable agents and QA teams to leverage functionality like keyword spotting, topic analysis or search specific sections of calls. Transcription enhances internal workflows and reduces the time and effort of solving customer issues, enhancing their experience.

The ability to search a transcript of interactions enables the QA team to quickly evaluate the dispute and decide on the right course of action immediately. This frees up time for the QA team to focus on providing maximum value to the dispute resolution process.

Make voice technology part of the workflow

Through the use of simplified, well tested and secure APIs contact centers can integrate speech-to-text services into their existing software stack with minimal effort. The option of on-premises deployment capabilities means that contact centers can keep their customer’s data secure, in their own environment and compliant to the guidelines mandated by regulators within their industries.

The deployment of stand-alone voice technology empowers contact centers to design and deploy their own solution made up their choice of best-of-breed technology. Simplified APIs make it easier than ever to pick and choose providers with the capabilities that align with the specific requirements of the contact center and ensure all components work well together. This reduces the need to use large end-to-end service providers who encrypt data locking contact centers into a single solution that might not deliver the required accuracy or quality.

Conclusion: Voice technology enables contact centers to leverage contact interaction history to improve customer experience

To improve customer experience and engagement, contact centers need to make the most of their billions of hours of voice data. Voice technology transforms this data into accessible transcripts in real-time – unlocking new meaning and value from customer interactions.

With a caller's contact history at their fingertips, agents can deliver a better contact center customer experience – and complaints can be resolved faster than ever before.