Driving Contact Center Effectiveness through a Custom Fitting of Your Speech Analytics Solution

Buying the right technology and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth. 

– Dave Barry

Optimum contact center efficiency and effectiveness is the holy grail for the operations leader or call center manager. There are many perspectives on the best path to take in the hunt for that prize. Even in this terrific compilation of views from 25 call center leaders, you can see the varying ideas on the keys to success.

At Zenylitics, we believe the key to unlock optimum effectiveness and efficiency in most contact centers is speech analytics technology. Most organizations of any size – say more than 50 agents – have adopted one of the available packages that are out on the market. We partner with CallMiner, although there are several alternatives. Regardless of the specific technology package, we have found that there exists a prevalent market myth that prevents speech analytics technology from delivering on the promise of measurable improvement. It is as follows:

The “Off the Rack” Myth: My speech analytics technology will deliver value as soon as we implement

The reality however is that speech analytics technologies need to be tailored to meet the specific business objectives, workflows and processes of your unique organization. We like to say “if you’ve seen one implementation, you’ve seen one implementation.”

Most speech analytics providersprovide some industry and situation specific “customizations” out of the box. But we find these are still too general. Every business if unique in how they approach their customer interactions; why wouldn’t their speech analytics program be unique as well? It is akin to buying a suit off the rack and only getting to choose the color of the suit. In that situation, you might get a suit that matches the tie, but it is most likely going to still be a ridiculous fit.

So what to do? Based on our experience, there are three things to focus on to ensure value is delivered from your technology.

1. Identify your business driversWhy do you need speech analytics in the first place?Are you trying to improve compliance? Do you want to make your QA function more efficient? Are you trying to improve sales conversions? Standardize processes so you can scale? Assess and improve agent productivity? Make a list of the primary business opportunities you are trying to address and write them down. Even if you already have speech analytics technology installed, asking what additional value you want out of your software is a great place to start. For instance, maybe you want to reduce the amount of time contact center directors are spending on the speech analytics process itself.
2. Leverage your technology’s functionality to automate nearly everythingManagement and leadership guru Peter Drucker once said “The human being is a very poorly designed machine tool.” That couldn’t be more true when using humans to audit and QA contact center interactions. The good news is that most speech analytics tools have significantly advanced in their ability to automate everything from QA functions to script compliance reporting. There are truly powerful tools on the market – you likely even have the technology available in your contact center. The key is to unlock that power.
3. Build scorecards that are functionalScorecards are the window into insights that help you and your leadership make decisions and take actions that improve results. Getting truly functional, easy to understand, customized scorecards deployed quickly is critical if you are going to get the value out of your system. Correctly designed scorecards can uncover a host of opportunities such as identifying agent call avoidance, missed chances for upsell, or pain points in the customer lifecycle.

Tackling these three areas with some urgency will not only help deliver results, it will elevate the status of the contact center in your organization as a strategic tool to help fuel growth. And as the leader over the call center, you will be seen as a superhero. A superhero with a nice, custom tailored suit.