Contact Center Escalations: How Speech Analytics can reduce them

As consumers of numerous services, it is common for all of us to make customer care calls. However, most of us often feel that the call center representatives are often not able to provide the desired First Call Resolution. Lack of FCR or resolution of the problem promptly on the first call is a key parameter of customer satisfaction. Would you pay a few bucks extra, but stick to the same service provider if you are assured of prompt, helpful, and round-the-clock support, or switch to another provider that offers the same service for a lower price, but has a nightmarish customer care reputation?

In the current age of consumer-centric operations and stiff competition, in most cases, it is not the product, but the customer care support that can be a game-changer. That’s also exactly where most of the contact centers continue to suffer as they are being increasingly made to comply with regulations and benchmarks. One thing that almost every company wishes to avoid is escalations. Let’s find out what it is and why should companies avoid it.

Escalations at contact centers happen when the agents/CSRs are not able to provide the right response and support to the customers due to behavioral issues or lack of knowledge/authority to do so. The primary causes of call center escalations happen to be the following.

· Poor agent training

· Language inefficiency and lack of agent confidence

· Lack of resources and information available to the agent

· Complex queries

· Skill deficiency of the agent

· Insensitivity of the agent

· Interaction turning heated

· Faulty product or service issues

What makes it more interesting is that in most cases, the supervisor also provides the same resolution that the agent offered or would have offered. In such cases, the escalations are merely a wastage of resources and can significantly hamper the efficiency of the call center operations as well as the reputation of the brand.

Escalations end up diverting managers from strategic tasks such as training, mentoring, feedback, monitoring and call analysis, etc. They end up spending precious time on calls that should have been handled by agents, to begin with. Consequently, the escalations are bound to negatively affect key contact center performance metrics such as First Call Resolution (FCR), and Average Handle Time (AHT). With real-time technology-driven support and agent augmentation available in the market, there is no reason why contact centers should continue to suffer operational inefficiencies.

This is where advanced Speech Analytics Software comes into the picture. Mihup has pioneered the vertical to create an omnichannel solution that can identify various business topics and provide actionable insights from the various customer interactions at the call center. This enables the managers to proactively create strategies, training improvements, and bring down the escalations dynamically. Mihup allows for visualization of the call analysis through dashboards and reports and facilitates 100% interaction analysis of call, email, and chat traffic to provide the complete “Voice of the Customer.”

The advanced AI-driven software can identify the caller’s intent and sentiment through analysis of tonality, rate of speech, dead air and voice energy, etc. The deeper metadata analysis helps the software identify and predict customer behavior patterns and to create optimized processes and response mechanisms. Mihup is creating path-breaking speech analysis software that offers unlimited potential for continuous process optimization, cost savings, and growth for customer service operations. In short, speech analysis is the future of call center operations in the digital age!