Speech Analytics: Best Practices for Analytics-Enabled Quality Assurance Sponsored By:

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1 Sponsored By: - i DMG Consulting LLC

2 Table of Contents Realizing the Potential of Speech Analytics... 1 Top Uses of Speech Analytics... 1 Best Practices for Getting Started... 2 Analytics-Enabled QA... 4 Final Thoughts... 6 About Calabrio... 7 About DMG Consulting i DMG Consulting LLC

3 Realizing the Potential of Speech Analytics Speech analytics is a very a compelling and powerful tool. These solutions capture, structure, analyze, categorize and use customer conversations to improve service quality, minimize risk, and reduce operating expenses. These are three of the top goals for virtually all contact centers around the world. Speech analytics has caught on in the market because senior executives and contact center leaders understand that it gives their organization information and insights that were impossible to obtain in the past. It s a unique application. The challenge is that it s still relatively new, and the related expertise and best practices have not yet found their way to the broader contact center community. This white paper provides best practices, steps and tricks for succeeding with these solutions. Specifically, it explains how to use speech analytics to enhance your quality assurance (QA) process. Top Uses of Speech Analytics Contact centers are the primary buyers and users of speech analytics. Figure 1 shows the top ten ways in which speech analytics is being used by contact centers. The number-one use is to identify the reasons why people call. This can be somewhat problematic, in that the data is interesting to senior executives and contact center managers, but is generally not actionable. More often than not, enterprises create very attractive charts and presentations showing call reasons, but fail to do anything with the findings. The second most common use of speech analytics is to automate the QA process. Increasingly, vendors are selling analytics-enabled QA solutions where speech analytics is used to identify calls for review, instead of the traditional manual approach where supervisors had to listen to many calls in order to find the few that would benefit from further attention and analysis. As contact centers remain productivity-oriented, even in the customer experience era, improving first call resolution (FCR) rates by decreasing the number of calls that are transferred, placed on hold or require a follow-up callback is the third most common use. A pure productivity play, and the fourth most common use of speech analytics, is reducing agent handle time. The system can identify long calls and help determine the underlying reasons for the extended talk time. Script compliance is the fifth most common application of speech analytics. This is where organizations use the solution either to ensure that agents have communicated necessary information to a caller, e.g., reading a disclosure at the end of a transaction, DMG Consulting LLC

4 or to make sure that an agent or collector, for example, did not say prohibited things. The return on investment from compliance applications can be extremely high for regulated contact centers, such as collections environments. Figure 1: Top Ten Speech Analytics Uses Identifying reasons customers call/trend analysis Automating the QA process Increasing FCR/reducing transfers, holds, callbacks Reducing average handle time Script compliance Reducing customer attrition/identifying at-risk customers Improving self-service utilization Improving sales performance Improving collection effectiveness Gathering competitive information Source: DMG Consulting LLC, April 2012 Best Practices for Getting Started There are many high-value uses of speech analytics. Quality assurance is one of the more common ones, due to its proven qualitative and quantifiable benefits. However, regardless of whether speech analytics is used to automate the quality assurance process, to discover the reasons why people call the contact center, or to proactively identify at-risk customers, the steps for getting started are the same. The steps are: DMG Consulting LLC

5 1. Decide how you want to use speech analytics, which will, in turn, drive your functional and technical requirements. 2. Select your initial speech analytics use(s); the more specific the better. At the beginning, keep the focus very narrow and limited to 2-3 uses. Expand uses gradually as you grow more familiar with the solution. 3. Put together a speech analytics team comprised of employees who are going to be charged with overseeing the application and applying the findings. If speech analytics findings are being applied to the enterprise, include influential advocates from all impacted departments. Otherwise, use contact center staff who are positioned to affect change, such as supervisors, trainers and QA specialists. 4. Assign a speech analytics administrator. This may not be a full-time job, but there needs to be one dedicated person as well as a back-up resource responsible and trained on all aspects of solution. Speech analytics is an art and a science; there is a great deal more to it than just generating reports. 5. Roll out the speech analytics solution; involve the team in the implementation so that they learn how to use the application. Keep in mind that the results and return on investment from speech analytics improve with experience. It will take time to learn how to use it effectively. 6. After implementation, conduct formal training for the speech analytics team so that they know how to run searches and reports. 7. Use the new application to surface actionable results for each specific use. Initially, you will need to run it multiple times to obtain valid results. With each run, the quality of the findings should improve. 8. Early on, as you learn to use the application, manually validate the findings by listening to a sample of the surfaced calls. As time goes by, this will become less necessary. 9. Once you re comfortable with validity of the results, create a distribution list for speech analytics findings, and share the results on a timely basis. 10. Create and institutionalize a change management process in your contact center or enterprise to apply speech analytics findings. This is the key to realizing quantifiable benefits. 11. Each reporting period (daily, weekly or monthly), produce a report that shows speech analytics findings in the current period and what was done to fix the issues identified from the prior periods. This document should also assign responsibility for each of the surfaced issues DMG Consulting LLC

6 Speech analytics is a tool to facilitate change and improvements. But it will yield the desired results only if it is applied on an ongoing basis. Speech analytics can be highly effective in enhancing Six Sigma and Lean-type initiatives. Analytics-Enabled QA Speech analytics is changing and improving the way that contact centers perform quality assurance. Analytics-enabled QA solutions use automation to review 100% of calls and identify interactions that require attention whether because they are examples of excellent handling, where agents should be complimented and rewarded, or because an agent s performance is poor and they need to be coached. Embedding analytics into the QA process enhances it by automating many supervisory tasks. Analytics also uses a variety of capabilities and technologies to improve the output from QA solutions and make the findings more targeted and actionable. Practical Uses of Analytics-Enabled QA In the past, supervisors or QA specialists selected calls for evaluation based on either a random search or a criterion such as time of day, type of program, call length, etc. Speech analytics gives managers visibility into all of their calls. Using speech analytics, managers can now identify calls that contain specific key words, phrases or concepts. For example, a manager may want to capture and evaluate all calls that mention a competitor, involve an up-sell attempt, discuss a new marketing program, include angry words, indicate customers at risk of closing their accounts, or contain any other situation that can be clearly defined. Outstanding calls Bad calls Long calls Short calls Angry callers DMG Consulting LLC

7 Here is how to use speech analytics for quality assurance: 1. Put together a team of two or three managers/supervisors/qa specialists people who really know your business. 2. Start with a pilot; select two or three business issues that you want QA to monitor. 3. Use your speech analytics vendor or a third-party consultant to help you set up the first couple of searches. This may be expensive, but it is the best and quickest way for your organization to learn how to get good results. 4. Listen to calls live or recorded and compile a list of the key words, terms, phrases, concepts (including words that are said near other words or phrases) for each of the targeted business issues. (This is easier to do from recorded calls because you can replay the transaction and fast-forward through sections that are not relevant.) 5. Set up two or three queries in your speech analytics solution, and test each one against a set of calls. Keep the initial set of calls small. 6. Run the speech analytics application using the test calls, and see what it finds. 7. Manually check the business validity of the findings. Take the list of calls that were surfaced for each of the business issues, and listen to each one to see if it was correctly classified. 8. Update speech analytics system findings when a call is incorrectly classified, as this will help the system do a better job the next time; these solutions are selflearning. 9. If need be, enhance the queries and do another test run, including the manual validation process. Each time this is done, the output and findings should be more useful. 10. If necessary, repeat steps 4 to 9 until your team is comfortable with the findings. Keep in mind that it will take time to learn to use your speech analytics solution effectively. 11. After validating and improving your search criteria, run the updated queries through a larger set of calls. You will need to specify the calls that the system should use for this analysis. 12. Work with your speech analytics vendor to customize reports and dashboards in order to make the findings actionable. Over time, you ll learn to do this yourself and will no longer need the vendor. 13. After you re comfortable that the right calls are being surfaced, share them with your QA staff. 14. When your QA team and other staff have begun using the output from speech analytics, have them provide constant feedback on the quality of the findings. The speech analytics queries will likely have to be tuned as the business evolves. 15. Once you have two or three highly effective queries, it s time to broaden your scope and look at additional issues DMG Consulting LLC

8 Final Thoughts The goal of understanding your customers wants and needs is highly desirable, particularly if you ve developed a systematic way to use these insights. Speech analytics is the most cost-effective way to make this happen, as long as you have an established method training, coaching, change management, Six Sigma, Lean, etc. to apply the findings. One of the top uses of speech analytics is automating the traditional contact center quality assurance process. Speech analytics-enabled QA significantly reduces the amount of time supervisors dedicate to finding calls that need attention (whether very good or bad), and allows them to deliver timely and targeted coaching to agents. This will have an immediate positive impact on quality, agent and supervisor satisfaction, and ultimately, the customer experience DMG Consulting LLC

9 About Calabrio Calabrio, Inc. develops and markets Calabrio ONE, a comprehensive suite of contact center workforce optimization software that s easy to implement, use and maintain. Calabrio ONE includes call recording, quality assurance, workforce management, speech analytics and performance-based dashboards and reporting. Calabrio ONE is built on a modern Web 2.0-based architecture that allows the contact center to integrate new applications easily, as well as personalize and optimize the desktop toolset for each user agents, supervisors, managers, knowledge workers, and executives. News and information at About DMG Consulting DMG Consulting is the leading provider of contact center and analytics research, market analysis and consulting services. DMG s mission is to help end users build world-class, differentiated contact centers and assist vendors in developing high-value solutions for the market. DMG devotes more than 10,000 hours annually to researching various segments of the contact center market, including vendors, solutions, technologies, best practices, and the benefits and ROI for end users. DMG is an independent firm that provides information and consulting services to enterprise and contact center management, the financial and investment community, and vendors in the market. More information about DMG Consulting can be found at DMG Consulting LLC

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