Is Speech Analysis the Key to Ensuring Customer Satisfaction for Call Centers?

One of the keys to running a successful call center is making sure that the customers on the other end of the line are happy when they’re working with your call agents. If your agents are calling with great news for a client, that can be an easy goal to meet; unfortunately we’re not always going to be the bearer of glad tidings.

Which is why it’s essential that call center teams are able to manage the satisfaction and happiness of their clients and sense when a situation is moving outside of the ideal parameters.

How Speech Analysis Works

Thankfully, new scientific developments are making it possible to to ensure that caller stress can be identified early in a call so that the appropriate steps can be taken to remedy the situation. By analyzing the sound of a caller’s voice, software is able to alert operators of stress building on the other end of the line before it reaches a head, so that situations aren’t needlessly escalated.

Speech analysis tools—whether built into the platform, or made available through third party software and voice recordings—can detect minute changes in the speaker’s voice, revealing non-verbal cues about mood and state of mind that can help your staff or interactive system respond sensitively and appropriately to any situation. A call center software solution with integrated speech analysis can keep your agents one step ahead by showing them what’s really going on in the mind of a client.

Give Your IVR System a Human Edge

Many customers express frustration with automated response systems, and those systems often fail to account for their stress. In some cases, customers may end a call early rather than continue to interact with an interactive voice response (IVR) system or complete the necessary steps to speak with a representative. This lack of the “human element” can result in a negative customer experience, which could have a detrimental effect on your overall client relationship.

Speech analysis integration with an IVR or IVM system can soften the edge of your automated responses, giving them the ability to adapt to changing client moods. If your system senses a growing stress level it can either route your client onto a new pathway or initiate a direct connection with a representative, avoiding difficult situations. In some ways, speech analysis integration with an IVR system can offer you the best of both worlds.

Why Speech Analysis Is Useful For Your Staff

Occasionally, it can be difficult to understand exactly how to interpret a client’s tone of voice, but speech analysis can level the playing field by revealing information about his or her mood. This can be especially useful when a client’s mood contradicts what they might be saying, and it can help non-native language speakers better anticipate and adapt to a changing tone of a conversation.

You can think of speech analysis as the missing piece of the puzzle. The integration of business intelligence (BI) tools is making call center software smarter every day, giving your staff immediate access to a wide range of client information on their monitors. Add in mood information provided by speech analysis, and the picture becomes even clearer, helping your staff make the right decisions and confidently steer the conversation forward.

Check out the 6 Reasons Call Center Execs Are Moving from On-Premised Solutions to the Cloud ebook to learn why the industry’s most forward-thinking call centers are moving to cloud-based software solutions.