The customer experience (CX) refers to the interactions a business has with customers at every channel related to marketing, sales, and customer service. In general, customer experience is the sum of all interactions between a customer and a brand.

The customer experience is not just a series of transactions; It is also about emotions. What do current or potential customers feel or think about the brand? At each touchpoint, customers’ thoughts will be positively or negatively affected. So, there are important decisions to be made at each touchpoint, and these decisions will affect the experience and ultimately the success of businesses.

Why is Customer Experience So Important? 

As products and services become similar and competition heats up, customer preferences are now based on experiences with the company rather than on specific product features and functions.

As customer experience becomes the main competitive edge, businesses must ensure that their customer experience strategy delivers personalized and satisfying interactions at every customer touchpoint. These interactions have an increasing impact on customers’ overall perception and impression of brands. This makes the customer experience critical to success.

The statistical insights, we’ve read from the article Top 40 Customer Experience Statistics To Know in 2021  on customer experience, say a lot about the significance of CX.

You can find a few of them below:

• 86% of professionals, engaged in or leading CX, expect to compete based on CX
• $35 billion is lost every year by US businesses in customer churn caused by avoidable CX issues.
• 83% of executives feel that unimproved CX presents them with considerable revenue and market share risks.
• 74% of consumers are at least somewhat likely to buy based on experiences alone.

In the light of all the figures, we can say that effectively listening to customers and acting fast to close the loop on their issues are becoming more and more vital for businesses. However, the high volume of customer interactions makes it impossible to manually review and analyze them accurately. The manual reviewing process can only focus on a fraction of interactions and is far from providing holistic results.

How to Overcome the Challenge: Speech Analytics 

With the help of AI (artificial intelligence), businesses can apply in-depth analysis to customer interactions across multiple channels. These analyses include not only textual and statistical details but also emotional data. With advanced features like emotion detection and sentiment analysis, businesses can gain valuable insights to make wiser decisions.

Call centers are still at the forefront of customers’ preferred channels for interaction. Especially during the pandemic, the call traffic at this channel increased significantly. This shift calls for greater care in choosing the right tools to monitor, evaluate and analyze customer experiences.

Choosing the right speech analytics solution is very important for the correct evaluation of the vast data obtained through customer interactions. The success of the solution for speech analytics has a direct impact on the call center activities such as:

• Call center monitoring and reporting
• Agent performance analysis and training
• Customer satisfaction and service quality analysis
• Automation of quality monitoring processes
• Crisis management
• Competition, market, and campaign feedback analysis
• Identification of cross-sales opportunities

As a global technology company helping organizations with Conversational Solutions be data-driven, increase efficiency, and deliver better customer experiences; we provide a very competent and proficient tool for speech and text analysis. Recently, we deployed our speech analytics product for Halkbank, the third-largest bank in Turkey.

The analytics solution implemented for Halkbank’s call center monitors all (100%) customer-agent conversations and evaluates in these following parameters:

• Customer/Agent Anger Ratio
• Agent Speech Duration & Speed
• Agent Interruption/Overlap Rate
• Agent Silence Rate
• Agent Waiting/Hold Time During Call

This solution offers actionable insights to quality management teams to coach and guide agents accordingly to improve the service level. The implementation resulted from the inputs below:

• 25 seconds decrease in ticketed call duration
• 10% decrease in silent rates
• 5% decrease in hold time
• 75% improvement in customer anger ratio

The solution implemented for Halkbank also stands out with its high accuracy rate of 94% for speech-to-text conversion.  This high accuracy rate enables quality management teams to discover customer pain points and frictions more accurately and it also provides deep insight on how to support agents for improved performance. Click to check out our success story here.

Please visit this link for more details and case studies about our solution for speech analytics.

Author: Çağrı Doğan, Sestek Marketing Team, Sestek