Forward-thinking contact center executives and quality assurance managers know that their organizations have room for improvement, even transformation. Intuitively, they know that they're wasting precious time and money on failed customer calls. And they know they're leaving money on the table from sales not made. But without objective, meaningful, and specific facts, what can they do? What can you do? Consider the power of speech analytics in the cloud.
Oftentimes, it starts with just a gut feeling—you may think your sales close rate could be better or that you have room to cut costs. For example, we worked with one client who thought his contact center could reduce waste and increase revenue. But, without quantitative facts, he didn't have the tools to take action in a specific and targeted manner. He needed data and insights. He needed analytics revealing not just the problem (the what), but also possible causes (the why) to better manage performance, processes, and costs.
This contact center's seasonal business was about to ramp up. Recruiting the right kind of agents and training them in the right way was critical. Success meant contributing more revenue to the top line and changing perceptions of the organization from cost center to credible business partner.
With affordable and flexible speech analytics in the cloud, the organization is on its way. In just two weeks, issues with sales calls were quantified. Automated reports revealed the percentage of calls that resulted in sales not closed. What's more, speech analytics identified key words, emotions, and pitch and tone that agents used in successful and unsuccessful sales calls. Unlike subjective, selective, or manual call monitoring, speech analytics sampled a large, quantifiable number of calls that revealed objective and practical insights.
A simple calculation based on average call costs revealed that $1.5 million was spent on calls that did not result in closed sales. This calculation only includes hard costs and labor; it didn't include money left on the table from lost sales. Do you think this figure gave the client the power to act? You bet it did. And speech analytics in the cloud is giving him the power of hard data to transform the way his team continually evaluates and is able to improve operations and performance over time.
Using speech analytics is not a "one and done" thing, because with it you can apply a focused approach to a variety of unresolved issues and continuously improve. You can drill down on particular call types, customer types, or agents to discover why issues are issues and how to fix them. Speech analytics reveals opportunities for short-term fixes that yield quick returns and long-term changes aligned to business objectives.
I've said speech analytics "in the cloud" a few times. Tha's a big deal. Why? Because this highly sophisticated tool is available from inContact in a flexible, affordable, and easy to implement Workforce Optimization (WFO) solution in the cloud. No longer do contact centers have to purchase equipment, configure it, integrate it into a quality program and then hope it all works together. Nor do contact centers have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and hire an IT professional to oversee it all. inContact's Analytics-Driven Quality is part of a cloud WFO solution and is eliminating the cost barrier (and hassle!) for speech analytics.