4 Pillars of A High-Performing Speech Program

As collections agencies develop a more strategic approach to flexibility and scalability in the post-COVID economy, speech technology has become an integral part of their growth journey. To boost productivity without neglecting compliance, call center-based companies must look to advanced speech analytics (SA) platforms to provide a positive consumer experience while bolstering effective operations.  

The speech analytics market, which was once valued at US$ 1.6 billion in 2020 is now forecasted to reach US$ 9 billion by 2030 as per a study by Report Ocean – a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 20%. This growth can largely be attributed to the need for technologies that can automatically track trends and performance in contact centers.

Nowhere is this truer than the accounts receivable industry, where an increasing regulatory crunch is making it harder for agencies to run efficiently while upholding the latest Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and Reg F rules.

While speech analytics can be an incredibly powerful tool to solve new-age call center issues, we commonly see agencies run into the same problems as they launch their speech analytics programs. Many mistakenly believe that if they just plug-in SA into their workflows, the platform will immediately deliver insights that can transform their call centers on the fly. Unfortunately, it’s usually not that easy.

What Makes Speech Analytics Hard?

It is worth accepting that speech technology is not a perfect science. As we continue living in the age of AI, we expect the transcripts to be perfect, the data to be 100% correct, and the recordings to be spotless once we implement a new SA tool into our collections business. If you have those expectations, you need a reality check around using a conventional SA platform without best practices.

• It is never easy to categorize calls without scanning every word within a conversation.
• You don’t know if you’re tracking your agents effectively as their scorecards remain forever unchangeable.
• Customizing dashboards and reports is hard because speech to text isn’t always perfect. Last-minute data pulls are hard as you never have the visualized data ready with you.
• Sentiment analysis of calls isn’t always accurate because you are rarely able to understand the context and then categorize the portion of the call into meaningful data for your reports or dashboards.
• Poor audio quality and the inability to integrate your SA to the recorder hold you back from tapping the full potential of your contact center.
• You don’t always have the budget to hire a speech domain expert who can handle all aspects of a speech solution.

From everything mentioned above, it is clear that just investing in a speech solution isn’t enough to improve your collections yield and scale your business. It is not a solution that you can set and forget. It requires ongoing involvement and inputs by different stakeholders and needs to be navigated with a clear strategy and planning.

So, what do you do to avoid losing focus? Begin with clear initial goals and then dig deep into what we call the “Four Pillars of a Competitive, Foolproof Speech Program.” Need help? We have compiled this guide that should help you achieve everything mentioned above and more in a step-by-step, stress-free manner, one goal at a time.

1. Dynamic Agent Scorecards

In a typical call center setting, agent performance is continually reviewed. In a manual setting, managers are required to spend hours parsing through sample call recordings. It’s nearly impossible to cover 100% of calls, and potential issues or non-compliance can fall through the cracks. In absence of automated agent scorecards, there exists no formal system to capture performance issues objectively, benchmark them against industry standards, and make informed decisions about agent training and retention.

Interestingly, speech platforms can also enable you to immediately see agent performance trends, increase training speed, and even assess the effectiveness of your existing training programs. With effective scorecards aligned with but not limited to measures such as the average call times, silence analysis, or times of maximum activity, collections leaders can identify areas where agents can be coached to improve their performance. Looking at data in the form of scorecards, not only eliminates the need for manual performance reviews but also frees a manager of any confirmation bias they might have against an agent.

Small Tips That Make a Big Impact:

• Switch to a SA platform that lets you create custom scorecards for each agent and project the same information to the agent panel to enable them to check their daily score and fix their errors. This way, agents will only see clutter-free information before starting their day for better focus, including their overall score trend for the month.
• Score all calls. Scorecards based on 100% of calls rather than a small sample are much more accurate and support better training and learning output. By monitoring and scoring 100% of calls, the opportunity exists to connect analytics, quality assurance, and performance management, collecting information right down to the individual agent level.
• Certain KPIs can always be part of your agent scorecards. That being said, choosing call center metrics for scorecards cannot be a one-time exercise. As per your current collections pattern, give more weightage to one metric that solves your biggest problem. For instance, if you spot an increase in call abandonments, focus more on the CSAT component of the scorecard vs the first call resolution (FCR) rate.

2. QA Intelligence

Traditionally, contact centers analyze a random sample of around 1% or less of calls. This method is rather self-selecting and not statistically representative. Speech analytics can provide 100% analysis across all calls and deliver a much more comprehensive, accurate view of what is happening in the contact center. While an analytics solution can be implemented to look at one particular pressing issue, such as compliance or automating the QA process, it can further develop into a tool for business intelligence, process optimization, consumers experience improvements and collections increase.

One of the real strengths of speech analytics from a QA perspective, the ability to automatically classify types of calls, might not seem very important. But being able to do this without asking QA personnel to sit for days listening to hundreds of calls is the difference between basing decisions on people’s opinions and gut feelings over basing them on hard verifiable facts. The automatic categorization of calls, based on the types of words and phrases that typically get used within collections calls is a starting point. By determining how many calls fit various categories, you can quickly keep a constant lookout for changes in consumer interactions.

The previous point leads us into a perfect segue into agent script compliance. With real-time prompts, SA can also make sure collectors say the right things throughout the conversation. It tracks each call and alerts collectors when they deviate from the pre-approved script. The benefit? You end up ensuring that all your agents are reading the mini-Miranda, respecting two-party consent rules, and following other obligatory requirements within the FDCPA and Reg F framework. If an agent skips an important keyword or phrase that is mandated by compliance norms, speech analytics flags it immediately. This way, agents get to correct themselves to avoid a compliance violation on the spot.

Small Tips That Make a Big Impact:

• Check the ratio of classified and unclassified calls more often to determine whether you have covered the topics properly. If 30% of calls in a group are unclassified, the chances are the search terms don’t match many words in the calls, and other categories must be found.
• Tap into transcription-based analytics (TBA), which will help you convert conversational speech to text. This way, you will be able to automatically create a text version of an unsuccessful phone call, allowing unlimited text searches when trying to determine the root cause of the issues. The context of words can be considered to avoid false positives. A text version of calls will make it possible to process data with other techniques such as data mining. This way, TBA will also automatically alert analysts to new topics for trend analysis.
• Reflect on important questions such as “Why is the business witnessing a sudden spike in silence time?” or “Why the number of unclassified calls is suddenly increasing? If you are a smaller agency, you may struggle to find someone with enough time to investigate and classify calls, especially to get to the root cause of the issues. If you have the bandwidth to hire full-time QA analysts, hold on to it! If not, many SA vendors such as Provana can add great value to your operation by providing off-roll data analysts with years of experience in the credit and collections domain for more comprehensive trend analysis and customized reporting.