Toll-Free University

Listen Closely with Speech Analytics

Parse customer conversations for detailed insights on consumer behavior 

The same technology that today fuels improved speech recognition on your phone, in your home, and in your car is also driving improvements in the contact center. Thanks to sophisticated speech analytics software, it’s becoming easier to evaluate customer phone calls for nuanced insights, such as consumer preferences, demographics and market trends. 

Phone calls present a goldmine of voice-of-the-customer data that can help marketers connect the dots of the customer journey from ad to response to sale, across online and offline channels. Companies that invest in speech analytics software to complement their marketing campaigns will reap the benefits of better contact center intelligence, customer satisfaction and profitability. 

The value of speech analytics 

In a contact center, a speech analytics platform can recognize a large vocabulary of words, analyze tone of voice, identify relevant phrases, and even estimate the age of a caller. This information can then be parsed for insights on agent performance, customer behavior, the customer purchase journey and service or product issues. 

After identifying these analytics-based data points, marketers have valuable straight-from-the-customer insights they can leverage to improve customer service, increase consumer retention, inspire brand loyalty and reduce operational costs. Here are just a few ways businesses and can leverage speech analytics: 

• Create strategies to streamline service quality, which can reduce call volumes, shorten call times and boost first-call resolution rates—all of which reduce operational costs 
• Develop training and retraining that improves agent performance based on identified weaknesses 
• Define action plans to retain customers that analytics have identified as at-risk 
• Implement procedures to exploit analytics-identified cross- sell or upsell opportunities 
• Develop protocols that pass frustrated callers on to more experienced agents, based on real-time emotion detection 
• Make tweaks to targeted marketing strategies, based on identified responses from specific demographics 
• Make real-time responses to changes in the market or to customer concerns, including updated agent scripts and immediate marketing and press responses 
• Suggest changes to products, pricing, services, or marketing and contact center processes based on recurring customer dissatisfaction 

Of course, solutions and improvements don’t need to stop in the contact center. Speech analytics-based data and insights can be shared across your organization to improve productivity, service and collaboration. In a study done by Ventana Research, organizations reported analytics-derived benefits that included: 

• Improved analysis of overall business performance 
• Better collaboration between customer-facing business groups 
• Improved alignment of decisions and actions across business units 

Keep the knowledge flowing with TFNs 

There are many ways to gather customer intelligence. Toll- Free Numbers allow businesses to turn conversations into a treasure chest of data. They’re a welcome mat for prompting as many conversations as possible, and for learning as much as possible straight from the customer. Businesses that see customer conversation as a business opportunity—rather than an operational cost—will gain a powerful customer intelligence and brand-building tool. 

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