Sentiment’s role in contact centre management
Sentiment Analysis – What is it and how does it work? Most speech analytics solutions, including Contact Lens for Amazon Connect (Contact Lens), provide sentiment analysis in their functionality. Sentiment analysis, using artificial intelligence, analyses both lexical content (the words a person speaks) and acoustic content (non-linguistic characteristics of a person’s voice, such as […]
Is the wallboard extinct? Far from it!
Wallboards: What are they? Why do they matter? Pre- Covid, wallboards were an essential feature of contact centres. They consisted of reports displayed on plasma screens mounted on the contact centre’s walls. Wallboards were designed to let all staff know what was happening in the contact centre in terms of KPIs, such as Average Handling […]
Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens
What is Amazon Connect Wisdom? How does it work? When Jimi Hendrix said: “Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens”, he had no idea that he would be summarizing the functionality of Amazon Connect Wisdom. (Wisdom). Wisdom combines speech analytics (the “listens” part) with a database search and retrieval tool (the “speaks” part). Speech analytics processes […]
Authentication without complication
Who needs voice biometrics? One of the main challenges of online business is authenticating customers when they call or log in. In his June 2017 article, Albert Seltzer, the Managing Director of SpesCom DataVoice, described the scale of identity fraud. The statistics quoted are from 2004. The UK’s Fraud Prevention Services reported that the number […]
QM – the future is hybrid!
Who needs QM? Quality Management (QM) has been used in contact centres for more than 20 years. The classic concept of QM is manual. A random sample of recorded calls is selected. A “Quality Analyst” listens to these calls, answering questions on a form to see if they meet certain criteria. Contact centres usually […]
Addressing agent stress with well-designed technology
Sources of agent stress In her recent article, Patty Yan identified 10 sources of agent stress. The top source was “Dealing with angry customers”. Number 6 was “Inadequate technology or equipment”. She described how one source could have a compound effect on the others. Slow loading applications make customers angry because they have to wait, […]
Speech Analytics – The “bigger boat” for bigger data.
“You’re going to need a bigger boat” Early in the film “Jaws”, the main characters go out on a fishing boat and have their first encounter with the great white shark. When they understand just how big and dangerous it really is, Brody, the Sheriff, then tells the captain: “You’re going to need a bigger […]
Self-service: How to handle increasing volumes without breaking the bank
Context In the late 20th century, companies recognized that serving customers remotely was more cost-effective than serving them face to face. The contact center industry was born. Since then, interaction volumes have risen sharply, as has the number of agents employed to handle them. The greatest cost is people. Thomas Moroney, writing for Customer Think, […]
Speaking the customer’s language
Everyone speaks English – don’t they? Despite Brexit and the pandemic, business still becomes more internationalized. The European Union (EU) has 24 official languages. These do not include languages spoken by non-EU nationals that live in the EU in sufficient numbers to justify contact centres handling requests in their own languages. For example, many organizations […]
Sentiment analysis – unravelling the mystery
What is it? In their September 2019 article, Nexidia defined sentiment analysis as a “branch of speech analytics that focuses specifically on assessing the emotional states displayed in a conversation.” Cloud computing has made sentiment analysis available for a much lower price, so interest in it has increased greatly. Customers usually make decisions based on […]