Customer experience is an ongoing challenge for contact centers

Customer experience is an ongoing challenge and priority for most brands. Offering positive customer experiences results in customer loyalty and advocacy leading to free marketing and repeat sales. Negative customer experiences lead to customer churn and damage to reputation, costing UK brands £234 billion a year in lost sales, according to Magnetic North.

The contact center is a hub of innovation and invests significant resource in improving customer experiences. From recognition and reward schemes and uncovering customer emotions to ensuring effective call flows and reducing customer wait times, contact centers leave no stone unturned when it comes to customer experience. But how do contact centers consume and understand this information at scale?

How voice technology helps to improve customer experience

Contact centers must analyze and understand every customer interaction to inform best practices, identify root causes to issues and offer an improved service over time. However, according to Call Centre Helper, just 3% of customer calls are analyzed due to the associated costs and complexities of analyzing audio data. This leaves a staggering 97% of voice data untouched. It’s a huge missed opportunity.

Voice technology allows contact centers to transform audio to text which can be consumed and analyzed at scale using natural language processing tools. Managers can then extract topics, themes and words from all customer interactions to inform best practices which can be indexed to deliver best-in-class support.

By analyzing such a rich dataset across numerous channels, contact centers can gain considerable efficiencies through activities such as effective call routing, informing best practices and offering first call resolution.

Use advanced analytics to inform best practices in your contact center

First call resolution is essential for customer retention. To achieve this, contact centers need to know how best to deal with customer complaints. By transforming audio to text using voice technology, contact centers have access to a wealth of insights and knowledge on customer interactions.

With this information, contact centers can extract key topics and themes from interactions to inform best practices. Contact centers can then collate these best practices and use them for customer support training to deliver exceptional experiences.

Research from Atlassian indicates that customer satisfaction drops by 15% each time a customer has to call back to resolve their issue. Voice technology enables contact centers to understand root causes of issues and lets them collate best practices. Agents can then achieve first call resolution, keep customers from churning and improve their overall experience.

What’s next for voice technology in the contact center?

The next area for contact centers to focus on is how they can positively impact a call as it is happening in real-time.

A growing number of contact centers are using speech recognition technology in real-time to trigger workflows that assist agents.

Rather than learning from previously failed interactions, real-time workflows are helping contact center agents positively steer conversations before they go off track. For example, mitigating non-compliant behavior by alerting a supervisor when certain words or phrases are mentioned on a call. Another example would be if certain questions are raised by customers, knowledge base articles are prepopulated and surfaced to the agent’s dashboard to help guide the conversation. The possibilities for improving customer experience using real-time speech recognition capabilities are endless.

Conclusion: Voice technology helps contact center managers identify best practices and improve customer experiences

Customer experience is an ongoing challenge and priority for most brands. Time and resource go into ensuring customers have the best experiences across the entire customer journey.

Contact centers are using voice technology to transform audio to text so that 100% of customer interactions can be analyzed instantly. From effective call routing and understanding customer emotions to informing best practices and facilitating agent training – voice technology is opening up immense efficiencies for contact centers.

Transforming audio to text enables contact centers to consolidate customer interactions across omni-channel activities and feed those insights into analytics engines to inform best practices. However, even the best analytics systems require an accurate input to reach their value potential.