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Whether you’re a product-based business or a service-based business, contact centers are likely a vital part of your success. As the business landscape continues to become customer-focused, companies need to ramp up their customer support efforts.

Speech analytics is one of the latest developments in the contact center space. It helps organizations identify and predict customer behavior and the factors driving it.

In this post, we’ll discuss how businesses can use speech analytics to improve agent performance and enhance the customer experience.

1. Use AI for Accurate Interaction Analysis

Interaction analytics enables you to calculate and connect Customer Satisfaction (C-SAT) scores across multiple channels. As a result, you can facilitate targeted root-cause analysis, which will help you determine how your customers think and feel about your service.

By implementing accurate interaction analytics, you can determine the high and low customer satisfaction rates, along with the triggers resulting in the scores. In addition to the C-SAT score, you can use AI-based speech analytics to obtain the Customer Effort Score (CES).

In all, interaction analytics allows you to figure out how your customers feel and the causes that drive their emotions.

2. Ensure You Have an Omnichannel View

If you measure customer experience on only one channel, you’re missing out on an enormous amount of useful information. It’s essential to have a complete picture of the customer journey.

By analyzing customer interaction across every channel, you can ensure that you don’t miss any useful feedback. In fact, customers are already giving their feedback and advice on different media. Most businesses merely aren’t listening.

3. Identify At-Risk Customers

Speech analytics can help you identify the root cause of customer dissatisfaction. Also, you can determine how your agents are handling your customers and their issues. By identifying the reasons for customer dissatisfaction, you can address the potential problems and encourage your customers to stay loyal.

Similarly, you can use speech analytics software to recognize what’s driving loyal customer behavior. If your customers appreciate your particular actions, you can iterate those actions to ensure long-term customer loyalty and satisfaction.

 4. Demonstrate Empathy

Almost all customers who call customer support are in a negative frame of mind. They’re cursing the company for not living up to what was promised, and the interaction with the support team is their only hope. If the support team doesn’t respond well, the customer will switch to a different company.

But at the same time, it’s an opportunity to demonstrate empathy and turn your customers’ negative emotions into positive ones.

The CallMiner Churn Index Report showed that 36% of customers are annoyed when they contact customer support, 16% of whom are furious. It’s imperative for businesses to identify what triggers these negative emotions and craft a strategy to transform them into positive experiences. 

Speech analytics software allows you to find words and phrases that trigger a positive emotion. You can instruct your agents to adjust their scripts with these words. Thus, your agents will use the tone and language that will deliver a superior customer experience.

 5. Combine Solicited and Unsolicited Feedback

Most companies focus on collecting solicited feedback from survey forms and review sites. While this feedback can provide valuable insights, it’s not fresh. Customers give their feedback after the experience, and in some cases, the gap can be days or weeks. Hence, it’s not possible to capture raw customer emotions.

Speech analytics solutions help you gather unsolicited customer feedback from the live calls. The software records all the calls and analyzes them to provide in-depth insights into the customer experience.

Besides improving customer experience, call recording and monitoring allows you to analyze and enhance call agent performance.

6. Prioritize Listening

Listening to your customers is the key to providing pleasant customer experiences. More than 45% of customers say that they just want to be listened to when they call customer support. However, only 23% of customers stated that they felt listened to.

A speech analytics system allows you to create a “listening” score that measures your agents’ listening ability. You can monitor this score and determine how each agent is performing in the listening department.

As a customer-focused organization, listening should be one of your brand values. Many times, the sheer number of calls can make you overlook the listening aspect. Using speech analytics, you can ensure that your call agents are focusing on listening.

Wrapping Up

The customer service sector is continually evolving, as new trends and developments are coming to light. What speech analytics promises is no less than a revolution. It enables businesses to take deliberate actions on the customer service front by identifying a buyer’s emotions.

Contact centers that are efficiently using speech analytics software are likely to excel in the customer service department. On the other hand, companies still sticking to manual analytics will have a hard time staying afloat.