How the Financial Industry is betting on RTSA solutions for Customer Excellence

How the Financial Industry is betting on RTSA solutions for Customer Excellence.

Banks are often ahead of the pack when it comes to adopting new technology to drive operational efficiencies. Frequently, it’s a case of economics.

Even the smallest efficiency or enhancement can amount to massive savings. And who wouldn’t want to capitalise on that?

Many banks have such a large customer base that what might seem like a modest fraud management efficiency, or customer service enhancement, can quickly amount to huge operational savings when extended out over five million, 10m or even 15m customers.

That’s been a driver for banks implementing new speech recognition technology. After all, it not only enables them to achieve enhanced security but also save time in the ID verification process. In so doing, it potentially allows them to enhance customer satisfaction and therefore reduce customer churn – a key objective for any bank.

These kinds of capabilities can be hugely beneficial for any bank of course but it’s worth remembering that the latest speech analytics solutions and real time speech analytics (RTSA) can do so much more for banks than just verify a customer’s identity.

Today, banks and other financial services organisations are increasingly using this innovative technology to deliver a broad range of business benefits including compliance and quality assurance and driving operational efficiencies.

Here are a few tips for how they can get the most out of RTSA

Use RTSA to achieve high-quality analysis tailored to each interaction: is by its nature flexible and the latest systems allow banks to define the characteristics to be monitored and checked for each interaction or individual sales or marketing campaign, for example, and set the right evaluation criteria accordingly.

Focus on raising quality and compliance levels: The latest RTSA tools allow banks to start raising performance levels and quality scores immediately. Using these solutions, banks can instantly spot when agents have failed to follow the agreed script, or where they have used language that does not meet compliance requirements for example. The agents themselves can instantly take action to rectify it, as part of a self-coaching process, which at the same time addresses the customer’s problem and pushes up the bank’s quality scores.

To ensure an objective call evaluation, the evaluators are divided into ‘hard’ evaluators, based on phrase recognition
(to check whether predefined phrases and keywords were said during a call), and ‘soft’ evaluators (assessing the
‘softer’ speech factors such as clarity, volume and stress levels).

Leverage speech analytics for training purposes: Using the latest RTSA tools, banks can listen in and learn the key phrases that their ‘superstar’ sales and service people use to ensure they sell more and achieve optimum customer satisfaction feedback ratings. Having deciphered ‘the code’ and worked out what those key phrases are, banks can then build them into their training plan and customer engagement strategy and ensure all agents use those same phrases. Indeed, the software not only lets agents detect them in the first place but also prompts and ensures adherence to them when they are interacting with customers.

RTSA can also monitor speech ratios between the agent and the customer, detect cross talking and interruptions. This gives the bank an understanding of the emotional content of a given call, which can be a key benefit in handling ‘difficult’ or stressful interactions with sensitivity and emotional intelligence.

Use the technology to deliver more proactive customer service: One of the great benefits of the latest RTSA technology is that it can be applied to more than just the initial engagement with the customer. If he or she has a query that is difficult to resolve or requires additional information that the agent has no access to, these systems can be triggered to interrogate frequently asked questions (FAQs); knowledge management or transactional solutions, in order to provide answers that both exceed the customer’s expectation and help progress the interaction to a rapid resolution.

Today, the prospects for RTSA technology look increasingly bright. Speech recording has been around for years of course and is still widely used by businesses across a wide range of industry sectors for dispute resolution, agent training and quality control purposes. However, as computing processing power has increased, the ability to analyse in real-time has become increasingly viable and affordable. It’s rapidly gone from a niche application to a mainstream solution and – it may confidently be predicted – one with huge potential to transform customer service across the banking and financial services sectors.

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About Real Time Speech Analytics – A unique solution

Real Time Speech Analytics (RTSA) offers fully automated quality assurance and call optimisation for every call. Innovative speech analysis technology allows organisations to monitor and improve conversations in real time, as well as evaluate call recordings. The solution analyses agent and customer speech to provide live feedback to the agent themselves, and after to team leaders and quality assurance teams about what is being said and how it is being said. It monitors stress levels, speech clarity and script adherence, all whilst the call is in progress. When evaluating recorded calls, the Speech Analytics software is powerful enough to scan over 70 hours of recorded calls in under one hour.

For any organisation, RTSA is an invaluable tool for quality assurance and campaign optimisation, agent coaching, and for the documentation of business transactions. It is this unique approach which is setting RTSA Interactive Soft Evaluators capabilities apart from the competition. It can be deployed as a standalone, part of the full Real Time Speech Analytics suite or integrated to the overall Quality Management or Contact Centre solution to continue to control, monitor and improve performance.

The voice of the customer

The voice medium is, without doubt, the most effective of contact channels, but it is also the most expensive as it takes vast amount of effort and expense to engage with customers, to deliver a productive and profitable outcome. Therefore the ideal is quality and service is corrected in the call rather than in post mortem. This new approach to speech analytics creates a new era for contact centre service providers and in-house contact centres in the field of company-wide quality assurance.

Live Coaching with immediate returns

Listening to your customers is a key part to customer loyalty and encouraging first-class conversations increases customer satisfaction. The single biggest benefit is the “live feature” which provides practical help to agents as well as listening to customers. It offers a checklist for every call and key indicators, for example warning agents against increased customer stress levels, or own bad behaviour such as talking over the customer. This not only dynamically improving performance but increases training efficiency by allowing agents to self-coach.

The uniqueness of our solution allows tailored coaching to agent weaknesses on the fly, continuously increasing agent efficiencies.

Helping agents who are willing to deliver good quality calls to do so – and helps quality assurance staff to identify those, who don’t.

Multilingual, Easy-to-Use Solution

Real-Time Speech Analytics is intuitive and easy to use, and requires no specialist speech expertise. Clear metrics and graphical statistics show agent and campaign performance and flag problem calls for quality assurance and evaluation in a completely objective way. The solution is available in a range of languages. It uses market leading speech recognition technology to support English, German, Italian, French, Spanish and Turkish, including dialects. Further languages can be made available as an extension.

Easy Configuration of Tailored Analyses

You can define the characteristics that are to be monitored and checked for each campaign in an independent, simple and quick manner, and set the right evaluation criteria using eight different evaluators. To ensure an objective call evaluation, the evaluators are divided into ‘hard’ evaluators based on phrase recognition to check whether predefined phrases and keywords were said during a call, and ‘soft’ evaluators, which assess the softer speech factors such as clarity, volume and even stress levels. The solution also monitors speech ratios between the agent and the customer, detects cross talking and interruptions, and measures the quality of the audio signal.

Comprehensive Reporting

Real-Time Speech Analytics provides clear, graphical evaluations of call characteristics at the level of individual calls, agents or the entire campaign, all in an instant. Real-time analysis of live phone calls immediately flags up if relevant information has not been given or not been given correctly, and helps agents correct themselves. The integrated management functionality enables the system to provide user-specific analyses, allowing agents to view their own statistics, while coaches and team leaders see the results in overall context.

• Increased success in agent scoring resulting in less callings to evaluated manually
• Automation of quality assurance and increased efficiency of the Quality Management team for training and coaching
• Self coaching dramatically allows agents to improve performance during calls
• In call agent review and amendment guarantees legally certain contracts and a decrease in customer cancellations or disputes
• Achieved better customer service and increases the satisfaction of the customers

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The benefits

• Encourages first-class conversations to increase customer loyalty
• Improves agent performance
• Minimises errors and complaints
• Legal certainty – ensures mandatory information is given
• Ensures compliance
• Flags problems in real time
• Uncovers cross and upselling opportunities
• Evaluates campaign quality at the push of a button
• Identifies individual training needs
• Quality assurance with 50% more efficiency
• Modular software with open interfaces for easy integration

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Legal Certainty
Any breach of compliance rules can be costly for a business. Real-Time Speech Analytics indicates, live during a call, that important or mandatory information has been missed or incorrectly said. This ensures legal certainty with script adherence, ensure contract terms are explained correctly and in some cases stops agents giving construed advice. All of this continues to deliver compliance and reductions in cancellations and customer disputes.

Contact us for more information.