A Key to Next Generation Quality: Speech Analytics

Erika Van Noort of Bell Canada walked us through the evolution of customer care at Bell Canada and provided a deep dive on the power of Speech Analytics.

Bell is moving from a more fragmented business, built through acquisition, towards a more integrated , optimized environment for the customer. One way to optimize is through mining existing data, including call data.

Here was Bell's wish list of what they wanted to learn from their call data:
- Root causes to why customers call
- What value add vs. non value add
- Get at the true Voice of the Customer
- Reduce what Price called earlier dumb contacts and increase time for value adding contacts
- Customer intelligence (preferences, drivers of behaviors, etc.)

In response to these and other questions, one approach to data mining is speech analytics.

"Speech Analytics, Erika explained, " does not mean you never have to listen to customer call again. Only if you don't care about your customers." But through speech analytics Bell has learned a lot about process, products and service, more than they could have learned from traditional call monitoring, including:

Benefits of speech analytics?
- Root cause analysis
- Real time feedback
- Positive impact on FCR
- Reduced low value calls
- Opportunities for cross selling

And this is using the superset of all calls, not a sample, something you just can't do with traditional call monitoring.

An analytics tree - how Bell looks at each call
- a call we want?
- routed correctly?
- resolved well?
- a church opportunity?

Speech Analytics: What Bell does

- take all calls
- break them down by reasons why customers call
- look at trends and outliers
- get at root causes
- identify real time call back opportunities

Results were great: FCR up, Sat. up, escalations down, productivity up, revenue way up

And employee feedback was very positive. "At last you have realized a dish that goes at 2Am is not my fault."

Making the wins real:

- 1 customer event took 3 and 1/2 months.
- 6 customer calls and transfers
- 1 hour and a half of call time
- Cost? $400

Now multiply that by all the repeat calls and you are talking real money!

Understanding length of call by call type enables Bell to set thresholds for talk time based on what is really needed to get the customer's work done right the first time.

Finally, this information drives changes to process, product and service design based on a systematic analysis of true voice of the customer. And this VOC is used at the highest levels of the company.