Thousands of call center professionals. One spectacular location. Five days of inspirational, educational, customer-oriented keynotes, sessions, demos, and more designed to help companies deliver exceptional customer service.
This year’s #CallCenterWeek (CCW) in Las Vegas, NV showcased what is becoming increasingly clear: Customers expect service on their own terms whenever they need it, in whatever digital channel they want.
As noted by Call Center Week, “Expectations have grown and the key word is effortless. For a brand to truly differentiate by leveraging customer experience, effortless has to be at is very foundation.”
CallMiner was there every day of the show, exhibiting our suite of speech technology products and interfacing with customers as well as our industry peers. When we weren’t busy with our Data & Analytics Demo Drive Session or our “Moscow Mule” cocktail reception, we spent our time discussing ways to drive optimal customer engagement in today’s customer-centric marketplace.
In case we missed you at the show (or you’re interested in show highlights), we’ve put together a list of 3 key takeaways from Call Center Week 2016. Enjoy!
Speech Analytics Is Critical
According to Donna Fluss, President of DMG Consulting, speech analytics can help call centers achieve four primary goals: reducing operating expenses, providing outstanding customer experiences, increasing revenue, and reducing customer attrition. Fluss also estimates that the ROI of speech analytics can be realized in as little as nine months after implementation, making the benefits far outweigh the costs.
But, if this year’s Call Center Week taught us anything, it’s that speech analytics is no longer a “nice to have” but a must-have to meet customer and competitive demands. Customers we spoke with were eager for more information on speech technology, as well as how they can improve performance in the call center.
During the show, CallMiner announced a significant improvement in the Eureka speech-to-text recognition. Already delivering the industry’s fastest speed to intelligence in customer engagement analytics, the upgraded recognition capability delivers up to 80-90% word recognition accuracy, with improved performance for low fidelity call recordings, support for more than 20 languages and dialects, and other advanced speech recognition capabilities.
Customer Experience = Predicting Customer Needs
In addition to the necessity of speech analytics, another key takeaway from this year’s event is that customer expectations are steadily rising. Research, in fact, shows 7 out of 10 customers would be willing to spend more with a company they believed would provide them with excellent customer service.
As discussed during the show, the customer experience has shifted its end goal from personalizing to predicting customer needs. “When the customer experience is effectively delivered through the contact center,” notes CCW, “benefits can include higher customer and employee satisfaction, increased revenue and efficient operating cost structures. This growing expectation profoundly changes the role of customer service and the responsibility [call centers] have in leading [their] organization’s success.”
Call Center Collaboration & Knowledge Sharing
With the rise in customer expectations comes the need for companies to evolve beyond the traditional call center to fully engage customers and meet their demands. Call Center Week showed evidence of this transition, with many companies looking beyond speech analytics to omni-channel analytics.
To that end, companies at the show expressed interest in tapping into the knowledge of their industry peers to better understand this transition and share their learnings with others. Those who stopped by the CallMiner booth showed enthusiasm for our new Engagement Optimization (EO) online community of CallMiner customers and customer engagement professionals. EO enables community members to learn from industry thought leaders, connect with peers, share best practices, and post and respond to topics of interest.
Final Thoughts
As the world’s largest contact center conference, Call Center Week offers contact center professionals the chance to connect, engage, and determine the best ways to provide customers with exceptional service. Many thanks to all who stopped by the CallMiner booth during the show – we enjoyed speaking with you and look forward to seeing you again at next year’s event!
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