A New Set of Call Center Metrics
SpeechCycle this week introduced its Caller Experience Index (CEI), a call center measurement tool that creates for executives a numerical score that assesses the efficacy of their call center solution. Until now, CEI had been used exclusively by SpeechCycle to measure its own solutions.
Customers subscribe to the quarterly service and provide SpeechCycle with significant quantities of log files, audio utterances, and call recordings. SpeechCycle assesses both quantitative and qualitative analytics to deliver a prescriptive ranking, going beyond metrics that provide only a piece of the equation, such as call completion rate, for a comprehensive understanding of the overall customer experience. (CEI) helps companies understand how to increase adoption of automated phone service, and how to improve the overall caller experience going forward. It helps phone self-service shift from call deflection to a strategy that services the callers, builds loyalty and is seen as positive customer service. SpeechCycle CEO and chairman Zor Gorelov describes the offering as a "data analytics service."
"We’ll do the analysis and provide you with a number and set of recommendations you can follow to measure, manage, and improve your caller experience," he says.
According to Gorelov, enterprises typically assess a variety of different factors in judging the performance of their call centers. The problem, he believes, is that this information is too segregated. One of the CEI’s selling points is that it produces a compound number that companies can manage to systematically improve their system. And while many enterprises would measure grammar performance, it’s only one component of a successful speech solution.
"All these things were done haphazardly, and couldn’t produce a single number that customers could manage to it and realize this quarter I’m at X and next quarter I’m at X.5, which is a better number and are moving in the right direction," Gorelov says. And aside from metrical data, SpeechCycle also provides customers with a list of steps they might take to improve the system.
SpeechCycle is currently working with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to optimize the metric such that it will become the industry standard. Alan W. Black, associate research professor at the Language Technologies Institute at the university, described the CEI in a press release as an "important advance" as the metric attempts to capture both objective and subjective measures about the caller experience.
"The message we’re sending to the marketplace is this: Automation rate and customer sat are directly linked," Gorelov says. "You cannot improve automation and drive customer satisfaction down. You must work on those two things in sync."