Applying speech analytics to financial services

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. Many banks have such a large customer base that what might seem like a modest fraud management efficiency or customer service enhancement, can quickly mount up to huge operational savings when extended out to up to 15 million customers. That has been a driver for banks implementing new speech recognition technology. After all, it not only enables them to achieved 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 beneficial for any bank, of course but it is also worth remembering that the latest speech analytics solutions and real time speech analytics (RTSA), in particular, 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.

Getting the most out of RTSA

1. Use RTSA to achieve high-quality analysis tailored to each interaction

RTSA 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. 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). 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.

2. 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 and 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.

3. 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.

4. 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 the customer 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 also help progress the interaction to a rapid resolution.

Conclusion

Today, the future 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 – but 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 – we confidently predict – one with huge potential to transform customer service across the banking and financial services sectors.

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