The most successful operations leaders are always looking for that “edge” or tool to give them an advantage. They’re searching for that new process or technology that will resonate with their executives during their next big board meeting, when they hear something like:
”(insert change here) drove a 17% increase in (insert team here)’s production in the first 60 days post- implementation.”
It’s not the sexiest statement, but operations leaders will add the result to their resume, and their executives will take it to the bank.
Driving success through operational improvement with technology is at the core of our business. It’s what excites me about speech analytics (SA), and is a foundational value we look to provide our clients. Generally we focus on call duration, silence (blocks and %), and after call time. Be more efficient, have less dead air, control conversations. Pretty straightforward stuff. These metrics, when coupled with interaction data, provide insight to drive key initiatives for contact centers. Better training, better processes, better call routing, equals better results, which hopefully lead to non-sexy board meeting statements like the sample above.
But the applications that are most exciting to us are the ones that appear organically, and don’t appear on project documents or roadmaps.
Recently we engaged with a client on our managed SA product. They were looking to target agent call flow and script adherence, customer experience and pain points, objections and agent rebuttals. Standard but quite powerful applications of SA to their business.
During the opening of one of our regular “workshop” calls, our client mentioned they were bogged down with a vendor audit process. After a few discovery questions, our gears were turning. Here was a daily problem that was non-standard for us, but could definitely be solved with speech analytics. A few creative metadata tweaks and test scorecards later, we had a workable product.
JT Allen, President and CEO of myFootpath, on the process:
“The vendor audit process we created took a very manual review that took several hours a day down to about 15 minutes. In our business, we buy qualified calls from vendors. Each call must meet certain criteria. Zenylitics helped us easily find the calls that didn’t meet the criteria through customized categorization and call scoring. Not only does it save us time, but it also empowers an administrative assistant to do the work that used to take a senior manager to do. It’s a powerful solution for us.”
Positive operational change that carries the biggest impact for me lies in the issues we don’t even know we have. Not only does it affect organizational efficiency, it can benefit the staff impacted. Seeing innovation, regardless of scale, is invigorating.
“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” —Lao Tzu
