How many of you know that when you call a tech support agent, your conversations are recorded? If the tech support service is bad, you might get irritated and might raise your voice to show your dissatisfaction. The agent on the other end of the phone would understand that you are irritated and would try his level best to deliver a good service and improve his key metrics like CSAT and FCR. The support agent might understand your emotion based on your tone; but the recording machine that records your call may not realise that you are angry
Enterprises are incorporating speech analytics to analyse customer emotions and gain insights from customer interactions to improve their service and also fine tune their product capabilities. The robot Tobor from 1951 movie “Tobor the great” had some human capabilities, including the ability to "feel" emotions and react via a telepathic device built into his robotic brain. This concept was considered to be only science fiction till a few years ago.
Today, speech analytics software solutions have the ability to understand human emotions far better than a human agent. Analytics has opened the flood gates for enterprise customer care to understand not only various emotions of customers from their voice but also analyse if the customer is speaking the truth or not. Speech analytics tools that have inbuilt lie detectors can sense lies too. So the next time if you try to tell a lie even with a straight face, you would get caught.
The various uses of speech analytics in tech support
Speech analytics can be used to
1) Deliver exceptional customer experiences
Imagine when your customer calls your contact centre for support and if you are able to analyse their emotions based on speech analytics insights, you will be in a better position to service them better. The CSAT score goes high because customers are serviced better.
2) Improve Agent performance
Speech analytics helps agents in many ways. The Average Handling Time (AHT) goes down; First Call Resolution (FCR) score goes high and the agents are in a better position to resolve issues too. This helps agents to work in a happier environment.
3) Improve security posture
When speech analytics can identify a customer from their voice, it can be used as an authentication tool too. Even when the best mimicry artists imitate a customer, a speech analytics tool will be able to identify if the voice belongs to the customer or not. Customers need not provide any other additional information to verify their identity. Though this idea is still not mastered by enterprises, it would soon be there.
4) Reduce support cost
When repeat calls are reduced, issues are resolved faster and customers are happy and the enterprise saves cost. Speech analytics is no more a science fiction script from the movies. It is a reality today.
I would be happy to know your views on speech analytics. In the meantime, let me go and see if Siri can understand my emotions.
- Prason
