In August I wrote Gamification With Speech Analytics. I made this simple graphic to show four levels of understanding what is happening on your phones… the jump from one level to the next leads to exponential (or, as Emmett says, geometric) value:
The values I’m assigning are arbitrary… I just made them up. But they feel right to me. Here’s my break-down of what each of these mean.
Recording: Value = 1
Just about any phone system you choose for your sales or call center or UX team has a recording function. You can “record this call for training purposes,” or whatever. Recording the call provides value, but not nearly as much as what any of the other levels can provide.
Really, the value is that in case you need to reference a call, perhaps for legal reasons, you can. It might not be easy… it might take days to hunt down a specific part of a recording, or piece recordings together, but as long as you have your recordings you can.
Not even going to talk about how long you’ll need to keep recordings, or how much disk space you’ll need to have to keep the recordings, or the staff you’ll need trained on maintaining or accessing the recording system.
Bleh… now that I think about it, if all you are doing is recording, you are spending considerable overhead for very little value.
Transcription: Value = 2
Transcription is where you get the audio of every call transcribed, and have access to written (typed) documents that you can sift through. This can be done, automatically, of course… it’s not like you have to hire a team of transcriptionists.
The quality of the transcription could be questionable, as shown by other automated transcription services you might have seen (like what Google, or YouTube captioning, provides). But at least you’ll have documents you can easily search to find specific things.
Notice the value is 100% more than just recording. I think it is easier and faster to search through documents than it is to search through recordings (and you need much less disk space for storage, making it more affordable). However, if you have a separate document for each call you’ll appreciate software that makes it easy to search through thousands of documents, instead of doing it manually.
Speech Analytics: Value = 6
Okay, not it is getting good. Before you freak out and think “OH NO! Speech analytics is for BIG companies with BIG budgets,” rest assured, the days of speech analytics being unaffordable is over.
When Snowfly started to develop our Speech Analytics products we heard that only massive call centers had the budgets to use this amazing suite of tools. Implementation fees could easily be $50,000 or $100,000+. Per minute fees where massive, and custom work fees could easily be in the six figures. If you didn’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to get started, you just couldn’t afford it.
A lot has changed. Snowfly has very affordable tools that can help you get a handle on what is happening on your phones. Whether you listen to 5% of the calls, 20% of the calls, or 100% of the calls, we have gotten the costs down to a fraction of what the massive speech analytics companies charge.
But that’s not the best part… as we work with clients we have improved accuracy of our speech analytics from the 50% to 60% accurate they were used to, from previous providers, to over 90% accuracy. This takes fine tuning but we are convinced that the more accurate our analytics are, the more useful the data is from which you can make decisions.
Speech analytics is defined well in this post. In a nutshell, we take the recording, create a transcript (this is where the quality and fine tuning come in), and then determine what is and isn’t being said on a call. You give us criteria to grade against, and we’ll sift through (aka, analyze) the transcript to determine if that criteria was met or not.
For example, if your agents need to have a warm greeting, or verify a credit card number, or whatever you really want them to do on every call, we can monitor and report on that.
One of the best features is that we send the right information to the right people. We can send a high level summary to executives, a more detailed team assessment to supervisors and managers, and a personalized feedback report to each agent.
No longer do you need to rely on a sales coach to monitor maybe 3% of every call. You can have the Snowfly Speech Analytics suite do this for up to 100% of the calls and send relevant, rich, and meaningful reports to the sales coach. Then, the sales coach can pull agents into individual coaching meetings and go over the calls, and figure out where to praise and what needs to be improved.
Speech analytics is amazing, and multiple times more valuable than either recordings or transcripts. If it weren’t for bringing in the next level, gamified speech analytics, I’d say this is a value of 10!
Gamified Speech Analytics: Value = 10
Okay, this is where it gets really, really good. Again, the diagram:
I only gave gamified speech analytics a 10 because 10, on my scale, is the highest. But really, it’s like a 15 or a 20.
First, a little background: Snowfly was launched in 1999, founded on principles of human behavior and sustainable positive behavioral change in the workplace. We have been helping companies improve measurable results for two decades. We’ve been in call centers and restaurants, manufacturing plants and sales teams. We say, if you can measure it, we can improve it.
We also know “what gets recognized gets improved!”
Snowfly has been in the incentives, recognition, and gamification space for quite a while. Because we were a gamification company first, we were able to engineer gamification right into the speech analytics product.
This means that Snowfly Speech Analytics was designed to have high engagement with people on the phone. Agents know that not only will they get a grade for each call, but as they improve their grades they can be recognized. They can also be rewarded, either intrinsically or extrinsically.
Without getting to deep into the psychology of motivation, our systems are built around positive behavior change and reinforcement, which means you team WANTS to use our system. They want to get the feedback, and they want to see improvement in their work.
If you have ever been involved in bringing new programs and software to your team you know that adoption rate is very important. With Snowfly Speech Analytics you won’t have to threaten your team into using it because they’ll want to use it.
When combined with our performance improvement tools in Snowfly Incentives, we have a powerful, exciting environment that reinforces a culture of improvement, cohesiveness, and excitement that you have been trying to build. All of this contributes towards increased employee satisfaction, increased employee engagement, increased employee performance, and a culture where your top performers want to stay.
Ready to learn more?
Let’s get on a call. Our team is ready to show you what we’ve created to help YOU create the results and environment you have been working towards.
