After encountering ineffective self-service platforms and then enduring long wait times to get live help, consumers routinely experience agents who are ill-equipped to solve their problems. New CCW Digital research reveals that only 23% of consumers feel these agents are knowledgeable, and just 19% feel they are sufficiently focused on solving their problems.
How can we overcome inhibitors to agent performance? How can we empower them to make sufficient customer connections? How can we ensure these agents enjoy their work and progress on their skill development?
In reviewing the technology landscape, including numerous exciting AI solutions, CCW Digital has identified one particularly promising solution: real-time transcription from Speechmatics.
“Recent trends such as the increasing complexity of customer queries, the rise of omnichannel communication, and the growing importance of personalization have heightened the need for real-time insight into conversations,” explains Trevor Back, Chief Product Officer, Speechmatics. “Real-time transcription enables agents to access accurate, verbatim records of conversations, enhancing their ability to understand customer needs and provide timely assistance.”
The coveted solution that is as operationally relevant as it is technologically exciting, Speechmatics’ offering addresses an ever-growing gap in the customer and employee experience spaces, while paving the way for better journeys now and into the future.
Why prioritize real-time transcription?
“Automate simple issues so that agents can focus on complex ones” may be a cliché, but it is a valuable contact center goal that has significant ramifications for customer interactions.
Notably, it increases the importance of accurately capturing the verbatim – and understanding the intent – of customer conversations. Whereas agents can answer simple questions related to password resets and payment due dates in their sleep, complex ones will require a deeper, nuanced understanding of what the customer wants. They will additionally require an ability to personalize the conversation based on the customer’s specific needs and emotions.
Inherently more challenging, achieving the requisite understanding is particularly daunting in today’s communication climate. With customers and agents using a plethora of mobile devices in remote, potentially noisy environments, the ability to accurately hear conversations is by no means guaranteed. The globalization of business interactions introduces different languages, accents, and regional dialects, further jeopardizing the likelihood of understanding what the customer says and means.
The rise of omnichannel communication only amplifies the challenges – and stakes – of appreciating customer comments, intentions, and sentiments.
“Over the past 5-10 years, a lot of emphasis has been placed on omnichannel experiences with text as the input,” says Back. “However, when customers are unable to get a resolution through these channels, they will typically turn back to voice to get support. The trouble arises when the technology isn’t up to the task. Poor IVRs that don’t understand the voice of the customer due to language or accent barriers cause jarring customer experiences. But technology is essential for scale and operational efficiencies. Highly accurate speech recognition is required in these instances to understand customers and improve resolution times.”
The struggle to even understand a customer across the omnichannel journey, of course, says nothing of the difficulty of routing that customer to the agent best-suited for addressing the problem they have shared.
It is also imperative to consider what this evolving landscape means for the agent experience. Agents are already overwhelmed by their workload, with more than 80% of companies confirming that their agents spend too much time on low-value interactions. Further effort sources include call note-taking (72%) and post-call work (71%). The frustration of handling these tasks will not only compromise agents’ ability to focus on supporting customers but actively hurt their job satisfaction at a time when employee retention ranks as a pivotal contact center priority.
Training is also becoming more complicated, due both to the distribution of workers and the growing unpredictability of customer conversations. Methods for elevating training, at scale, are increasingly critical.
Actionable data: Parlaying transcription into robust customer intelligence, high-quality service
Clearly, there is a benefit to AI-driven, real-time transcriptions of customer interactions. What makes the Speechmatics solution so exciting is the manner in which it helps organizations transform conversations into critical change drivers.
“Speechmatics empowers deeper understanding of conversations by first providing accurate and real-time transcripts of customer conversations,” articulates Back. “Once conversations have been transcribed accurately, additional analytics features like speaker diarization, emotion detection, and keyword spotting can be deployed to give additional understanding from transcripts.”
Coupled with real-time translation, sentiment analysis, and summarization, the solution provides an actionable, crystal-clear picture of what all customers are saying during all calls. There will neither be a lack of appreciation for what a given customer is experiencing nor a lack of ability to optimize the contact center based on those experiences.
“Once a contact center has access to this level of detail from customer calls, they can then provide deeper analytics from customer conversations to not only know what was said, but understand the nuances behind why things were said,” declares Back. “This enables organizations to extract actionable insights quickly and at scale, facilitating a deeper understanding of customer preferences, pain points, and behavior patterns.”
Even before uncovering long-term voice of the customer insights, accurate, real-time transcriptions are crucial for providing high-quality service in high-stakes situations.
During a medical crisis, the difference between correctly and incorrectly transcribing every word can have life-altering consequences. During a legal, banking or insurance, conversation, discrepancies between what is said and what is heard can result in catastrophic financial ramifications.
As there is no margin for error in these situations, there is no opportunity to blame poor audio equipment, unexpected regional dialects, or back-office distractions. Accurate understanding is the only acceptable outcome, and failure to achieve that outcome can result in a painful experience for the customer – and have a horrible long-term impact on the brand.
How Speechmatics elevates customer and employee experiences
With precise insight into what issues customers are facing, how they are communicating their needs and intentions, how they are feeling during their interactions, and how their demands align with the contact center’s existing capabilities, companies can transform their operations into beacons of customer centricity. Indeed, the beauty of Speechmatics lies not simply in the quality of the transcriptions but in their actionability.
“Organizations can leverage these insights to optimize processes, improve agent training, personalize customer interactions, and drive strategic initiatives, ultimately leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty,” states Back.
Specific benefits include the following:
Assuring compliance, consistency, and quality - As agents take on more complex interactions while working in an increasingly distributed world, the risks of non-compliance, inconsistency, and inadequate service all grow. Real-time transcription and analysis helps brands mitigate this risk, providing them with a frontrow seat to the quality and accuracy of each conversation.
Augmenting agent knowledge - With vivid insight into what customers are asking and how they are asking it, brands can improve the quality of their knowledge bases. From upgrading content, to improving searchability and classification, to guiding agents to the most relevant knowledge entries, organizations can remove an enormous contact center inefficiency while improving agents’ ability to solve complex customer inquiries.
Increasing employee satisfaction - Undue effort is the enemy of agent satisfaction, and as CCW Digital research routinely confirms, it is abundant within the customer contact space. By removing the pressure and difficulty of note-taking and of gathering context about customers and their issues, the Speechmatics solution enables agents to do what they were meant to do: use information to establish meaningful connections with customers.
“Speechmatics supports an elevated employee experience by streamlining workflows, reducing manual tasks, and providing agents with valuable insights and tools to better understand and serve customers,” says Back. “This empowers agents to deliver more personalized and effective support, leading to increased job satisfaction and performance.”
Tailoring employee coaching - Not simply a way to elevate knowledge bases, real-time transcription enables brands to more accurately understand the strengths and weaknesses of individual agents – and how those attributes correlate with customer satisfaction.
Personalizing conversations - By capturing vital context about customers, brands empower agents to properly personalize conversations. Instead of asking customers to repeat information, which reflects a lack of appreciation for the customer and their time, agents will be able to use accurate transcription data to recognize customers and their sentiment, and then demonstrate recognition through warmer, more personal, more direct support.
Experience design - The more a brand can learn about what works and does not work within its experience, the better it can optimize the customer journey. From more astutely deploying bots, to remedying root causes, to improving scripts and policies, to delivering proactive engagement, accurate transcripts facilitate actionable customer experience improvement.
“Once a contact center has access to [a vital] level of detail from customer calls, they can then provide deeper analytics from customer conversations to not only know what was said, but understand the nuances behind why things were said,” adds Back. “This enables organizations to extract actionable insights quickly and at scale, facilitating a deeper understanding of customer preferences, pain points, and behavior patterns.”
Intelligent routing - After exerting energy interacting with a chatbot or Tier 1 agent, the last thing a customer wants to do is reach a supposed “expert” who knows little more about them or their issue. By harnessing the power of Speechmatics’ transcripts, brands can glean the true intent and sentiment of individual customers and then pass them to the most suitable agent.
Back provides a simple summation of the benefits: “Real-time transcription can be used to accelerate actionable insights, such as providing agents with knowledge base articles on topics customers are talking about, or real-time call routing of customers to the most qualified agents equipped to deal with their query.”
Real-time transcription: the start of a journey toward customer centricity
The benefits of Speechmatics’ technology are immediate, but they are not limited to the immediate term. The potential to leverage conversational intelligence to improve agent performance, orchestrate better journeys, and enhance product and support offerings can continue indefinitely.
The Speechmatics team assists with that longevity, committing to a future-proof mindset that will continually leverage new technology, such as increasingly advanced AI, to elevate the quality and actionability of transcriptions.
“Speechmatics also has an exceptional Support team to respond to customer queries, and a flexible roadmap that not only changes and progresses with new AI developments, but where customer feedback and priorities are also heard and acted upon,” assures Back.