Improving the Operational Efficiency and Service Quality of Contact Centers Through Speech Recognition and Integration with FAQ Systems

Co-create with Lumada! Improved visualization of inquiry calls

Improving the Efficiency and Quality of Inquiry Responses by Aiding Operators

Contact centers are increasingly swamped with work, and are expected to respond to customers through a variety of channels, including email, SNS, fax, and postcards, in addition to the conventional method of call centers, which is responding to customer inquiries over the phone. The role expected of the contact center is not only responding to inquiries, as in the past, but has now branched out in multiple directions to include promoting the company’s products, and identifying customer needs to help direct product development and marketing efforts.

Improving operational efficiency and response quality, regardless of operator proficiency

Contact centers serve as a point of contact between the customer and the company. In addition to responding to customer inquiries and complaints, contact centers are now expected to fulfill the role of a sales channel. In acting as the face of the company, operators must be courteous and meticulous in their responses, but they also need to do the following:

• Acquire knowledge regarding a vast array of services and products to handle a broad range of inquiries and complaints
• Reduce customer wait times, while maintaining and improving customer satisfaction by using acquired knowledge to efficiently and effectively respond to inquiries
• Enhance their IT literacy: for example, they must be able to use a PC to quickly and accurately enter the content of calls into a CRM (customer relationship management) system

In addition, contact center managers need to take steps to reduce operator workloads while striving to improve operating efficiency and quality, regardless of operator proficiency or experience. Managers need to do this even as their contact centers are tasked with handling an increasingly diverse and complex array of operations.

Using recorded calls effectively in contact center operations

Using recorded calls is an effective way of improving the efficiency and quality of inquiry responses, regardless of operator experience.

Contact centers are often faced with a range of problems, both big and small, including fielding unexpected inquiries and unreasonable demands, and misperceptions arising from poor phrasing or a slip of the tongue. Although just telling callers that their call is being recorded can reduce problems, a way to easily check recorded calls would further reduce issues by allowing both managers and operators to quickly identify the cause of a problem and to clearly determine where responsibility lies.

A speech recognition system that transcribes the content of calls into text (speech-to-text conversion) provides data on conversations with customers in an easy-to-handle format. The text data can be used not only to respond to inquiries, but also to improve existing products and to develop new products.

Aiding operators by using speech recognition and FAQ search functionality

Hitachi’s Speech Digital Solution connects to a contact center’s voice recording system and speech recognition platform. The solution performs speech recognition on collected calls and carries out speech-to-text conversion in real time. FAQ system integration helps further alleviate operator workloads by making it possible to search FAQs using keywords contained in the text data of a call.

With this solution, the current inquiry call is converted into text format. Using keywords extracted from the current call, the solution searches the FAQ system for FAQs containing those keywords. The system then shows a list of relevant FAQs on the operator’s computer monitor. From the displayed candidates, operators choose and read the response that best matches the nature of the inquiry. Through this process, operators can provide excellent responses regardless of their experience.

This process of using the accumulated data of recorded calls greatly helps operators to check what happened previously.

Using speech data converted to text to analyze customer needs and aid operators

Speech Digital Solution - A Way to Reflect the Voice of the Customer in Business Decisions

We provide a total support solution for analyzing VOC (voice of the customer) and aiding operators. This solution encompasses all necessary aspects: from consulting on the use of recorded calls, to building and operating the environment required for the customer to record calls, use speech recognition with speech-to-text conversion, and perform analysis.

Helping create new value by utilizing recorded call content

Advances in IoT technology make it possible to create digital records of various phenomena, human language, and behavior. Coupled with advancements in speech recognition and data analysis technologies, these advances have paved the way for communications with customers to be incorporated into measures addressing a wide range of issues, including aiding contact centers.

The Speech Digital Solution promotes the effective application of recorded calls in business operations by using recorded calls as digital assets, which can enhance contact center operations and aid VOC analysis. For this solution, we provide the following three services.

• Service supporting speech data utilization (consulting):
  Through this service, we can propose steps on how you can best utilize recorded calls based on the issues you face. We can use our extensive knowledge of data analysis to extract useful information and provide extensive support for customer issues: ranging from conducting business studies, reviewing and verifying scenarios for developing new products and services, and planning speech analysis systems.
• Service for developing speech analysis systems (system integration):
  Through this service, we help develop a speech data analysis platform capable of recording calls with customers and performing speech-to-text conversion and data analysis. The developed operating environment includes a speech recording system, speech recognition platform, and text mining tools based on your needs.
• Service for improving the efficiency of contact center operation (system integration):
  Through this service, we can alleviate operator workloads and improve the quality of responses to inquiries. FAQs relevant to a customer’s inquiry are displayed on the operator’s computer monitor, and customer information is automatically entered into the CRM system. This service also reduces administrator workloads by enabling simultaneous monitoring of multiple operators.

We are working to further enhance the services provided for the Speech Digital Solution to incorporate AI-driven advanced analysis and auto-response services.

Examples of applying the solution

This section provides examples of how this solution can be used to improve contact center operations, and how call analysis can aid in business development.

• Automatic entry into a CRM system (data entry support):
  The solution uses speech recognition, speech-to-text conversion, and text analysis to extract customer information from call content and to summarize the information. The solution then automatically registers the call content into a CRM system. This automated processing improves the efficiency of the operator’s after-call work.

  

• VOC analysis (cross-analysis with CRM information):
  Integration with tools that enable cross-analysis of speech text data and CRM information enables fast analysis of massive amounts of accumulated data. This solution allows you to acquire new insights by uncovering hidden needs and areas of dissatisfaction that did not appear in questionnaire responses or in the inquiry response history that operators entered into the CRM.

  

For details on our solutions, see the following webpages.

For details on the related solution, Next Generation Contact Center, see the following webpage.