5 tips to help raise contact center agent motivation

1. Introduce your agents to what you're trying to do with your speech analytics technology - discover keyword phrases which indicate trends. They may be able to help you develop your list of phrases to look for. What a sense of pride it will give them to contribute in this manner!
   
2. Allow free access to social networks and encourage agents to participate in company posts and train them in best practices for responding to social customer service. Cross-train them to handle emails, texts, tweets, etc. as everything does point to an omni-channel future.
    
3. Investigate what's available in rewards options from management. The incentives/rewards process always seems to yield additional motivations.
    
4. Let your marketing team have some fun with the agents. They can shoot photos and videos for promotional purposes.
    
5. Allow agents to develop mock calls that incorporate web cam usage and appropriate handling of customer situations.  This can inevitably be used to enhance agent performance as well as for training new hires.
   Read then full blog post for additional ways to supercharge your contact center agents!

Very Frequently Asked Customer Questions and Answers about Call Monitoring Capabilities

Can we record our live chat sessions so we can score them? 
Yes – Virtual Observer can be setup to trigger recording when a chat session begins, regardless of the chat system used. Using the same logic, we can also capture email, social interactions, etc, allowing users to then evaluate the interaction as simply as they would an audio call.

How can we calibrate our evaluation sessions?
Calibrations can be done by a simple check box on the evaluation header. This flags the evaluation for calibration purpose and is easily identified for analysis.

Can we query past or archived recordings using Speech Analytics?
Yes – From within the integrated "Call Insight" user interface, Virtual Observer offers an "ad hoc" querying feature which allows you to search through past events for specific words or phrases. These can also be saved for later use.

How do we share highly scored calls for training purposes?
Virtual Observer offers many different ways to share recordings and their subsequent scorecards with other departments. We offer a packaging function that allows users to email a link to the recording. From this link, the recipients can also access all of it’s scorecards. The packaging function will also email the actual recording and scoring files to the recipient if they are not in the user community, depending on defined security parameters, enabled permissions and de-encryption settings, of course.

Are the dashboard reports in real-time?
Yes – the dashboards offer real time analytics - representing the specified date ranges or saved query parameters. The dashboard reports can also be set to refresh automatically at a specified time interval.

Speech Analytics Helps Drive Customer Experience

CSI customer Cigars International (CI) is known for its' wide variety of cigars and their unflappable customer service.

One of the reasons they originally invested in Virtual Observer was because they found an affordable technology which could effectively assist them in achieving their lofty goals for the customer experience.

 With the quality monitoring process on track and continuously improving, CI decided to invest in a more aggressive technology, phonetic-based speech analytics feature of the Virtual Observer suite, to help take the quality assurance process to the next level.

 The return on investment which would come from speech analytics was a great positive change in CI's training model.

 A manager in customer service, speaking for CI, mentioned "We suffered from the 'whisper down the lane' syndrome - even though we were providing comprehensive training materials with talking points, even though we delivered those materials several different ways (classroom, desk side, email), we still found that shortly after training the talking points took on a life of their own and became something else. Often times wrong information would evolve. It would have been days or weeks before we would have uncovered this, however, with Virtual Observer Call Insight speech analytics, it was in one afternoon."

 Read more about how Cigars International surpassed their ambitions for the customer experience.

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Finding those disgruntled callers...automatically

Contact center supervisors are now using Speech Analytics to automate the process of identifying the calls they really want to listen to.

With some centers recording 10s of 1000s of calls per day, the process of finding the calls was like trying to find the needle in the proverbial haystack.

 The process was made simpler if the contact center agent tagged the call, or if the supervisor knew details about the call - customer name, caller id or agent name, you could then cross-reference a query against those call details, if your system had that information.

Customers now can have all of their recorded calls processed and "listened to".

By creating a category of specific keyword phrases, such as "Disgruntled Callers", the query can be run against the index of analyzed calls and matches can be displayed on screen in seconds.

 What kind of keyword phrases could you use to identify "Disgruntled Callers"?

 "speak to a supervisor"
"mad as hell"
"cancel my service"
"not very happy"
"have to call again"
"need a refund"
"just doesn't work"
"same old runaround"
"find a better deal"
"getting angry"
"HULK SMASH"...and so on.

 There are many different types of speech analytics systems, but they can usually be broken down into two categories: The “Dictionary” based and the “Phonetic” based.

The dictionary-based systems require users to define words and phrases in advance so the speech engine can look for or “spot” those words as the engine is analyzing the audio.

The “Phonetic Based Indexing Engines” are much faster and don't require you to program words in advance.

Our solution, "Virtual Observer Call Insight" is a phonetic-based, enterprise-class Speech Analytics solution that is simple, effective and affordable enough for contact centers of all sizes.

Call Insight provides the ability to receive important search results in real-time within our web-based interface.

Harvesting the Phonetic Value in Recorded Calls

The seeds have been planted, the ground has been watered, now is the time to harvest the phonetic value you’ve been waiting for.

What does "Harvesting Phonetic Value" mean?

It is the ability to automatically make sense of words and phrases stored in your recorded calls and using them to your advantage to help decrease cost and improve performance.

All call center managers are tasked with the same challenge: reduce costs and improve performance.
Depending on industry, improving performance could mean many different things, such as providing better customer service, selling more products and services, reducing handle time, increasing first call resolution and many others.

Basically the idea is simple. Management wants you to do what you do "better" and would also like you to do it "more affordably".

Virtual Observer Call Insight is a phonetic-based, enterprise-class Speech Analytics solution that is simple, effective and affordable enough for call centers of all sizes.

Our Phonetic Tools will harvest information in your recordings that were once otherwise not available in your normal telephony environment or enterprise data.

Extract these valuable pieces of information and put them to work for you.

How does phonetic speech indexing differ from large-vocabulary speech indexing?

CSI studied the speech analytics market for 3 years, listening to customers, partners and industry experts compare and contrast the large vocabulary indexing process and results vs. the Phonetic method.

Both approaches have their benefits, but vary in how they index your calls.

Phonetic based speech indexing occurs at a much faster speed than large-vocabulary speech indexing and is capable of making multiple searches across tens of thousands of recorded calls to identify valuable contact center insights, rapidly.

Perhaps the question then becomes "How fast will Speech Analytics harvest value from my recorded calls?"

8 ways Speech Analytics can help your organization ramp up call center quality

It's a given that Speech Analytics has good buzz, but let's step back a second before we assume everyone understands what Speech can do for you.

Different people interpret Speech technologies in different ways. Speech is being used in more and more diverse applications every day.

For purposes of this post, we're speaking of Speech Analytics for the call center, where recorded calls are indexed by a speech engine and then made available for search and reporting.
Here are eight ways Speech Analytics can impact your quality process, in no particular order:

* Improve agent script adherence: Modify imperfect agent processes by quickly finding instances where agents have used slang ("Umm", "Err", "Yo", etc.)

* Flag important calls for evaluation: Highlight calls where customers have mentioned a competitor's name.

* Fine tune your training programs: Identify trends in the types of calls your center is receiving: are they sales calls or support calls? Allocate your training resources appropriately.

* Increase First Call Resolution (FCR): Find out which callers have called in about the same issue more than once.

*  Reduce Average Handle Time (AHT): Discover process improvements as Speech Analytics reveals new insights into how agents respond to common questions. Some agents may be making the same mistakes over and over again. A simple speech search on the response will show exactly how many times it was used.

* Identify trends in customer displeasure: By grouping together keyword phrases which may indicate displeasure ("I'm not happy", "not working", "your service sucks") and instantly see how many calls match this category.

* Ensure compliance: Create a search using agent-trained trigger phrases such as "credit card number" or "social security number" to identify calls where sensitive data may be spoken and recorded. This has direct impact for Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance in particular. Someone tasked with removing these types of media or the specific data in question will appreciate a view where they can just see a list of calls which match this particular query.

* Fine tune your marketing campaigns: By creating search categories using your product names, brand names, ad slogans, and other keyword phrases, you can analyze emerging call trends on what's hot and what's not among all of your campaigns.

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Enhancing Quality Monitoring with Speech Analytics

We are pleased to officially announce our Speech Analytics suite as an integrated feature in the Virtual Observer call recording and quality optimization solution.

We have partnered with Aurix to leverage their phonetic-based speech engine, offering CSI customers the ability to enhance their quality monitoring processes with phonetic speech analytics features such as automatic call scoring and automatic call tagging.

You can read more about the strategic partnership with Aurix and more about our Speech Analytics features on our website.

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Speech Technology Basics, part two: Speech Analytics

"Speech Analytics": In relation to call recording, let's use an example of a Call Center Manager tracking spikes in call volume. In order to help figure out why, an advanced Speech Analytics tool would allow the manager to query a database for the highest used terms and determine what the customers are saying during these calls. Quickly the manager can realize most callers are talking about a recent “Increase in monthly bill”. Another example of Speech Analytics would be to query a database for how many times last month did a caller said the word “Cancel” versus how many accounts were actually closed. This would reveal a “Save” rate for the agents. Let’s say 1,000 Customers called discussing “Canceling their account” yet only 100 accounts were actually closed. This is a 90% Save Rate. These two examples use the concept of “Indexing” to determine what words were said for later query and analys

Speech Analytics can be broken down into two categories: The “Dictionary” based and the “Phonetic” based. The dictionary-based systems require users to define words and phrases in advance so the speech engine can look for or “spot” those words as the engine is analyzing the audio. When these words or phrases are spotted they are indexed for later analysis. The phonetic-based systems make a “Phonetic Track” of the audio as its being analyzed and index all words and phrases for later analysis. At this point you can probably realize that the “Phonetic Based Indexing Engines” are much more robust than the “Large Vocabulary Dictionary Engines”.

From the Wikipedia:
Speech Analytics

Speech Technology Basics, part one: Speech Recognition

I asked our director of product engineering to give me a few words for the blog that would present how speech technology can be used in the call center. He ended up giving me a whole lot more, and I thought it will definitely be something that others might like to read:

There are many different flavors of technology that can be categorized under the term “Speech Technology”. You have speech recognition, speech analytics, speech to text, interactive voice, phonetics, speech XML and so on down the line. Some of these technologies relate to call centers and some do not.

"Speech Recognition": This form of speech technology allows you to talk to your computer. “Open Microsoft Word”, “Start new document”. “Hello Mom . . . .”, “Save and Print”, "Save the World", etc., a simple way to verbally bypass your keyboard and mouse. If you want to read and write email while you’re on the treadmill then this is the way to go. This technology uses the concept of “Speech Training”.

"Speech Training": This is the method by which you train the software to recognize your words. You must read a story or list of sentences into the computer before you use the software, so it can expect how you will say various words. You are basically “training” the system to your voice.

IVR ("Interactive Voice Response") systems use "speech training". For example, an IVR vendor has speech capabilities in their products that will prompt the user for a response and expect a specific answer. Such as “Would you like to be transferred to the sales department? Please say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’”. This technology is very basic and simple and will work effectively across many different dialects, accents and slang. The IVR knows you will say some variation of ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. Another example is an IVR at a bank that can read your account in their database and determine your balance is $100. Speech XML capabilities within the IVR will have the IVR attendants voice actually say out loud “Your balance is one hundred dollars and zeros cents”.

Call recording allows you to record these IVR interactions to determine what your customers were inquiring about. This would be recorded and saved as audio. This technology uses the concept of “Expected Responses”. You will say some variation of ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, or you will say a number, or it will dictate a number, or you will say one of the employees names in an employee directory. There is a finite number of words or phrases you will say and therefore it can expect a certain range of responses. The resulting statistics could be considered to be Speech Analytics, but it is only a fraction of what Speech Analytics can offer the enterprise.

From the Wikipedia:
Speech Recognition

Creating a network of call center industry blogs

We're looking to find other company blogs to include in our new "blogroll" (a "blogroll" is a list of like-minded blogs) that we'll be debuting soon.

Virtually any company in the call center solutions market (who has an active blog) is encouraged to submit a link.

We'll review the quality of the blog and let you know if you've been included. We'll then ask for a link back and we'll make the entire blogroll available to include on your blog.

This will have positive effects on your blog traffic.

Segments of the call center industry we're seeking initially:

- CRM software companies
- IVR software companies
- VoIP systems companies
- Speech Analytics systems companies
- Call Center outsourcers
- Phone Systems integrators
- Call Center trade journals and news sites

If you are interested, please comment below.