Contact centers have recorded calls for a long time, mainly to appease compliance and dispute purposes. However, research from Call Centre Helper suggests that contact centers analyze less than 3% of interactions. This means that 97% of call data is untouched because it’s difficult to evaluate in audio format.

For many businesses, vast amounts of insight remain trapped in voice data that they don’t have the time or resources to review. Automatically converting call recordings into a text-based format means voice data can be surfaced, analyzed and understood almost instantly.

From analyzing the customers’ voice to agents and internal processes, analytics empower contact centers to improve customer experience. It helps to understand the internal workforce, identify knowledge or training gaps, and roll out data-driven programs and campaigns.

A PwC study revealed that 32% of customers would consider leaving a brand they loved after just one poor experience. This is a particularly striking statistic since the impact of bad customer experience costs UK brands £234 billion a year in lost sales.

There are many benefits to using voice technology in your contact center. Here are the top 3 ways voice technology enhancing the customer experience.

  1. Gives You a 360-View of the Customer

Contact centers still only analyze less than 3% of interactions. This is partly because there’s a lot of cost and complexity in analyzing so much data as well as the capacity needed to action those findings. Companies are missing out on a wealth of information on the Voice of the Customer (VoC). By recording and analyzing every interaction, companies can get a better understanding of customer pain points and offer opportunities for agent training and development in those areas.

Using analytics to identify root causes of issues speeds up issue resolution — and can even eliminate it. In turn, first-contact resolution is achieved and customer satisfaction improves significantly. Remember, 32% of customers would consider leaving a brand after just one poor experience; don’t give them that opportunity to churn. Recording calls and transforming them into text using voice technology lets you archive and analyze voice data. This data can be combined with other text-based customer interactions to provide a complete picture of the customer journey.

  1. Improves Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction and customer experience go hand in hand. They are a priority for most businesses. Making sure customer service is second to none is essential.

Voice technology enables companies to analyze the customer voice. Analysis of the customer voice lets companies identify when customers are happy, sad, angry, agitated, ready to churn and all other emotions they might be feel throughout the customer journey.

Customers prefer when customer service interactions occur over the phone, particularly when they’re unhappy or angry. If contact centers can capture and analyze the voice data from negative experiences, brands can put in place measures to avoid these situations. This helps with customer retention and drives up the overall customer lifetime value.

By capturing and using all voice interactions and combining these with other text-based interactions, brands have access to a huge pool of information. They will understand when customers are most likely to churn, how long resolution calls take, common customer concerns, etc. This information can be used to improve interactions, provide FAQs, accelerate resolution times and improve customer experience.

  1. Quickly Resolve Disputes and Issues

Contact centers strive for first-contact resolution. Resolving customer disputes over multiple calls damages the contact center customer experience and the perception on your brand. Therefore, it’s imperative to understand why customers aren’t happy.

Voice technology lets you analyze the VoC and agent interactions to understand the customer journey and identify behavioral patterns. Finding patterns and trends means that issues can be solved instantly — and that helps you achieve first-contact resolution. Voice technology lets you consolidate all interactions across all customer touchpoints to provide a wealth of metadata rich information. This information is used in analytics to solve customer issues throughout their journey.

The Next Steps

Voice technology transforms contact center customer experiences for the better. Gone are the days when voice wasn’t accurate enough or available in enough languages. Having accurate, any-context speech recognition at the foundation of your automation technologies will enhance and change the way you operate your contact center to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Businesses must look to automation technologies, such as voice, to drive efficiencies, improve performance, reduce costs and, ultimately, improve the customer experience.

Read our smart guide on how to improve your customer experience using voice technology. Find out more on ‘How voice technology changes the customer experience‘ on December 1 at 8am PT.

This blog was co-authored by Piet Knight. Piet has 20 years of extensive consultative sales, partner management and business development experience. 12 years of his career has been dedicated to channel sales in on-premises and SaaS industries. At Speechmatics, Piet is a Senior Executive and heads up the USA team. Piet previously held positions at OpenText, Nuance Communications, BroadSoft and inContact. He holds an MBA from Santa Clara University and a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University.