Leveraging Speech Recognition Technology in a Call Center

Call center customer interactions contain a goldmine of valuable information. And thanks to recent technology advancements, there are now several technology solutions that allow call centers to make good use of their data. Speech recognition technology is one of them.  

In this article, I’ll tell you how you can benefit from leveraging speech recognition technology in a call center. Don’t miss out on this one!

Speech recognition technology in call centers

Speech recognition is the ability of a program to identify and analyze words or phrases in spoken language and convert them into digital analytics. In other words, when customers talk to your agents, the system analyzes what they say and can trigger specific actions based on it.

Already, customers have embraced such technology when looking for a simple and quick way to access information or carry out simple tasks. You just have to think about Siri, Apple’s technology that entered the voice recognition market back in 2011. Since the introduction of Siri, the competition has stepped up to the challenge, with Microsoft launching Cortana and Amazon launching Amazon.

Of course, call centers quickly recognized the potential of speech recognition technology when talking to customers: it’s capable of recognizing a huge amount of vocabulary in many languages, can identify relevant word and phrases, analyze the tone of voice, and even estimate the age of callers.

Amongst other things, call centers can use speech recognition technology to identify customers who need special attention, pinpoint industry trends, and analyze customer behavior and purchasing patterns, while also identifying problematic products or services and help low-performing agents improve their performance.

Identifying customers in a simple way

Most customer service interactions involve sensitive customer data. Of course, keeping this data 100% safe and secure is of the utmost importance for any call center.

Therefore, call centers often require customers to memorize long passwords and identification numbers in order to individually identify them. By leveraging speech recognition technology, however, it is now possible to identify customers based solely on their voice. So, all customers have to do is to say their name out loud and the system will identify them by recognizing and analyzing their voice.

Therefore, with speech recognition technology, customers can use their own voice as passwords, with each customer’s voice being as unique as their fingerprints. This, of course, allows call centers to significantly simplify their customer identification processes.

Furthermore, common interactions, such as checking an account balance or requesting shipping information, can be easily automated using speech recognition technology. This not only eases up your call queues but also allows your business to offer round-the-clock customer experience.

Real-time support for agents

Personalization is perhaps one of the most important trends dominating customer experience, with customers expecting companies to offer them what they want, when they want. It’s no surprise, therefore, that businesses these days really want to go the extra mile to personalize their customer interactions as much as possible.

And as speech recognition technology has rapidly advanced over the past few years, such solutions, by analyzing the tone of voice during customer interactions, can now provide call center agents with real-time support when dealing with customers.

As we all know, it can be difficult for even experienced agents to work out if a customer is frustrated with how a conversation is developing or if they are about to hang up. Speech recognition technologies, however, can now identify everything from anger or dissatisfaction to enthusiasm in the voices of customers.

In practice, speech recognition solutions make real-time suggestions to agents, encouraging them, for example, to make an upsell offer if they detect enthusiasm in the customer’s voice. Similarly, when the system identifies anger or frustration, it can warn agents of the situation.

Needless to say, by leveraging speech recognition technology, your call center will be able to increase its up- and cross-selling rates while creating better relationships with customers.

As you can see, speech recognition technology has great potential for the call center industry. Make sure you leverage this advanced technology, and don’t miss out on the positive effect it will have on your customer experience. You can be in no doubt that it will pay off in the long run.