Improving sales analysis with Speech Analytics

It is rare for a contact centre to have no requirement for sales expertise within their calling teams. Even discounting outbound telesales calls, a wide variety of industries court potential sales opportunities over the phone on a daily basis. Without effectively identifying and exploiting these, you could be missing out on significant annual revenue. Today’s post illustrates how speech analytics can help you to define, promote and monitor sales within your contact centre.

Using speech analytics alongside agent monitoring and coaching

Do you know what makes for a great sales technique? Is this based on quantifiable evidence, or subjective experience? Without a strong understanding of what happens when someone in your organisation makes a successful sale, agent monitoring and coaching becomes a waste of your time. Your best agents will never receive the recognition they deserve and your worst won’t receive the training they need to improve. Speech analytics gives you the capability to group and listen to every call in which a successful sale is made and start to spot the patterns that emerge; the key phrases and agent behaviours that can convert a customer’s RFI or a follow-up on a lead into a confirmed sale.

Applying qualitative not quantitative measurements to sales calls

The reverse is also possible – wouldn’t it be enlightening to find the calls that went wrong and see what happened? Perhaps your ‘failed’ calls have a tendency to all be short calls – the insight here being that your agents are being hung up on before they even have a chance to pitch. If you judge your agents on the number of calls they are making and not the quality, this finding could turn your call centre around. If agents can’t engage in a decent conversation with a prospect and just keep skipping to the next call, they will rarely sell anything. Even if you already knew who your failing agents were, would you have been able to find out why?

Deliver evidence based training with speech analytics

From this point onwards, you can start to monitor how these trends change within your call centre, even creating bespoke dashboards to monitor every sales campaign as it happens and direct efforts to where they are needed. Agent coaching can also be monitored and managed using speech analytics – with the time that would have been lost to call listening, evidence-based training can be carried out as and when it is needed, with agents being presented with evidence of phrases that go unsaid, opportunities missed and customers alienated by bad sales tactics.

Speech analytics has the power to analyse selling practices quickly, defining best practice and bad practices in equal measure, ultimately turning sales experience and theory into proven practise and improved results.

If you want to speak to our analytics team about how you can boost your own sales productivity using speech analytics contact us now or call 0800 458 2988.