Beyond Call Recording: Speech Improves Quality Assurance Larry Mark Chief Technology Officer SER Solutions, Inc.

Affecting the Bottom Line

Business Challenges of Quality Assurance Improve the customer experience Identify poor performing agents Provide useful feedback for coaching and training Evaluate effectiveness of scripts and call handling processes Supply business and marketing intelligence to the rest of the organization Ensure compliance (FCC/FTC/HIPAA)

Quality Assurance solutions are not about recording calls. They are about evaluating calls. Automating a Quality Assurance System: Eliminates today’s costly, manual monitoring process Only calls of value are directed to a supervisor for review Improves the effectiveness of Call Center Quality Assurance departments Calls remain available for additional knowledge queries Enhances agent performance A New Way of Thinking A cost effective way to evaluate 100% of your calls

Why Evaluate all Calls? For many customers the contact center is the “face” of the company o Poor service causes customer attrition Companies invest heavily in their brand and image o Branding needs to be consistent within the contact center There may be a high cost of non-compliance o Lost sale, fines, etc.

Creating and Keeping Customers Natwest Stockbrokers discovered… o Customer acquisition is 5 to 10 times more expensive than retention Zurich Insurance discovered… o If they could sell a customer two products instead of one, the chances of retaining that customer increased by over 60% A recent study Bain & Co found… o Reducing customer defections by just 5% could increase profits anywhere between 25% and 85%

You Manage What You Measure Some Results Are Easy to Measure o Amount of revenue generated o # of customers who purchased product Some Results Are NOT o Brand recognition o Relationship building o Attempts to sell / up-sell When You Can’t Measure, You Must Analyze the Content of the Calls o Live Voice Monitoring o Random Recording o 100% Recording Contact Center Reports Focus on Results

Which Recordings Have Value? Recordings/Customer Interactions High ValueLow ValueHigh Value Worst Practice Best Practice

Leveraging Speech Recognition Technology

Until now, the only solution available for contact center operators has been a costly, manual process Assess Call Monitor Record Traditional Monitoring Process

The Business Challenge of Call Recording All Recorded Customer Interactions Reviewable Customer Interactions Quality Customer Service Script Adherence Verification Training Translates Directly to Staffing Requirements

Leveraging Speech Technology to Solve the Business Challenge High Value Interactions Optimize Human Interaction Time & Focus Business Effort All Recorded Customer Interactions Automated Quality Assurance Solution High Value Customer Interactions Quality Customer Service Script Adherence Verification Training

Automated Quality Assurance Automatically performs a quality check on every recorded agent-customer interaction Looks for calls that do not meet pre-defined quality requirements o use of inappropriate language o indications of dissatisfied customers Alerts Reviewer to only those calls which require immediate review and action Takes Reviewer to exact location in call requiring attention Allows you to leverage your existing call recording infrastructure

Mining Business Intelligence Identify critical customer concerns Determine low-value calls Spot emerging trends Highlight up-sell opportunities Provide valuable customer feedback to other business units Increase the value of every recorded customer interaction

Key Benefits Balances Costs and Results o Leverages existing QM staff to monitor more calls o Enables monitoring of same % of calls, with less staff Improves Customer Service o Quickly pinpoints problem areas o Provides mechanism to learn your customers’ perceptions Improves Agent Effectiveness o Identifies areas requiring further training o Determines effectiveness of scripts o Uncovers trends o Provides timely feedback for agents, supervisors, and departments o Measures best practices

Importance of Choosing the Right Technology

Process Once, Search Many Audio is Processed Once o Captured audio is transformed into a searchable format o CPU intensive transformation is performed once, not every time o Searching is computationally inexpensive o Analysis is performed by searching for key utterances o Allows business rules to be modified and re-executed o Enables data mining

Search Specification Language Proximity o Relation of phrases to each other, or fixed anchors such as the start or end of the call Alternative Phraseology o Specification of phrase alternatives that are acceptable for a single key performance indicator Beyond Basic Pattern Matching

Advanced Search Heuristics o Cadence Expected time sequence of KPI’s o A-Priori Knowledge of Script Flow Expected location of KPI’s within the conversation o In Combination with Meta Data Customization of KPI’s based on associated call data

Presentation of Results o Top Level View shows overall trends o Ability to drill down into specifics o Find offending calls, filtered by the drill down path Visual indications of confidence of the analysis

Enterprise Deployment Considerations Designed to work in concert with existing monitoring hardware, not replace it Not tied to a single transaction type Provides advanced heuristics for better understanding and anomaly detection Supports Centralized or Distributed monitoring strategy

Summary There are several new opportunities created when Speech Recognition is applied to conversations between agents and customers: o Agent Effectiveness o Monitoring Efficiency o Enhanced Customer Service o Reduced Costs o Information Accessibility Delivers Significant ROI

Questions & Answers