The 3 big reasons contact centers are moving to voice-to-text

What is the evolution of voice-to-text technology in contact centers?

 Voice-to-text technology is made possible by the recent rise in power of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Historically, the technology was used to convert customer calls into text for compliance and dispute purposes.

Now, advances in graphics and cloud computing have given new power to voice-to-text technology.

Its application has become widespread and is becoming the go-to technology for many contact centers. Voice-to-text technology gives contact center managers the ability to innovate with voice and build applications to derive new meaning and insight from their voice data. In this article, we’ll dive into the benefits that speech technology brings to the contact center.

How are contact centers using voice-to-text technology?

Voice technology is increasingly being used to transform calls and the richness of information within them into a valuable text asset.

Contact centers can combine this insight with other sources of information derived from omni-channel activities to obtain a holistic view of the customer and deliver significant value to end-users, agents and the wider organization.

This information can then be used to inform analytics solutions to uplift agent performance and ultimately improve the customer experience. 

A Speechmatics study found contact center companies adopt a voice strategy for three main reasons:

1. Improving end-user experience through analytics

2. Creating competitive advantages by optimizing customer interactions

3. Operational efficiencies through best practices

Why use speech recognition technology?

Improved customer experience

Some 86% of contact centers in the study recognized customer experience as the primary benefit of adopting voice-to-text technology.

Decreasing agent call time, NPS and sentiment analysis are some examples of how the industry is uplifting engagement. Other ways include:

• IVR

• Interaction history

• Knowledge base

• Analytics

• Speed-up issue and dispute resolution

Agents often represent the first interaction between a customer and the business. They are under pressure to ensure customers have the best experience.

The ramifications of a bad experience have a direct impact on the bottom line. Research from Magnetic North revealed that 71% of consumers would consider moving to a competitor if they had to repeat their query to multiple contact center agents.

They also found that 32% of consumers would go to a competitor immediately if the business did not meet their expectations for a response time. The impact of this poor customer experience costs UK brands £234 billion a year in lost sales.

With organizations making it easier to onboard new customers it has never been more important to ensure there are no reasons for customers to churn.

Creating competitive advantages by optimizing customer interactions

 The contact center is a hub of innovation.

Some 46% of respondents said a key benefit of adopting voice technology was to create competitive advantages to differentiate their offering to sell to enterprise clients.

For example, the use of speech technology to convert voice data into text creates a data set that was previously only accessible by sifting through audio recordings and listening to entire calls. Now, contact centers can create USPs and can process calls at scale, providing valuable and actionable insights.

• Example USPs include:

• Better analytics for agent training

• Optimized customer interactions

• Improving business operations and processes

• Voice strategies to layer on top of omni-channel processes

• Accelerated issue resolutions

• Improved customer experience analytics

Operational efficiencies

The adoption of voice-to-text technology enables organizations to process large quantities of call content faster than ever before. This is useful for four key reasons:

• Quality assurance (QA) teams can monitor far greater volumes of text data than audio data. The ability to convert voice into a text-based format and feed it into natural language processing (NLP) analytics tools generates even more value to QA teams.

• Customer issues can be investigated more quickly by being able to easily search for specific situations in text-based content rather than audio.

• Simplified requests can be handed off to automated speech-enabled tools. This frees up agent resource to deal with a larger quantity of complex issues.

• Transcription enables after-call admin work (which can take up to 30% of agent time) to be massively reduced, delivering significant time saving to process more calls.

According to the research, 36% of contact center professionals said that operational efficiencies were a key benefit of adopting voice technology.

Contact centers are adopting voice technology to improve efficiencies, including:

• Agent training

• More data for customer experience analytics

• Customer self-serve service

• Faster customer interactions

• Identifying best practices

• Improved agent job satisfaction

Do you know that you can evaluate huge volumes of call in real-time to improve agent performance and customer experience?

Learn more

A productive workforce

Voice technology enables contact center managers to augment their workforce. It allows contact centers to deploy sophisticated speech-enabled technology to deflect callers away from agents for high-volume, low-skilled tasks such as password resets.

Agents are an expensive and highly valued resource within the contact center.

Therefore, offloading mundane tasks that can be performed by automated systems means that agents can focus on issues that only humans can solve. It means that they remain challenged, fulfilled and valued which is important for agent retention.

The 3 reasons contact centers are moving to voice-to-text

So, there you have it, 3 reasons why contact centers are moving to voice-to-text. To get more information and read exclusive insights from contact center professionals, download our report!

Alex Fleming, Speechmatics