Why BPA Quality Contact Center QA

Analytics Driven Quality Service

BPA Quality‘s Analytics Driven Quality Service analyzes agent and customer behavior insightfully and objectively. The QA process becomes more than just checking boxes, it becomes a tool to increase agent performance, business intelligence, customer experience and operational effectiveness.

In today’s world where competition is more and more demanding staying on the leading edge becomes more important.

BPA Quality Managed Services help you stay on the leading edge and develop the capability to stay in front of the competition. 

Our Expert Managed Services ensure that you have a QA department that is second to none by supplying a team of experts that are there to monitor and develop the skills of your Agents.

Whether you want to outsource all or part  of your quality program, BPA’s industry  experts and managed quality services are  ready to take your organizations’ quality  program to the next level.

BPA Quality is located in offices in New York, Florida and the UK.  So, if you need to develop American customer engagement or looking for a global view, we can provide Quality Assurance programs in over 42 languages.

BPA Research

BPA Research Teams bring a scientific  approach to the measurement and  development of performance. Taking best practice and customer feedback, they  are able to construct metrics that will  produce successful outcomes to contacts  with customers.

BPA Psychometric Experts identify the  psychological attributes, including the  knowledge, skills and abilities that are  necessary to produce outstanding contacts  with customers. They identify behavior profiles  of successful contacts that can then be used as  a framework for optimizing performance.

BPA Process Development Teams identify and  develop processes that will remove barriers  and enhance the customer’s experience as well  as improving aspects such as AHT and FCR.

BPA Consultancy and  Professional Services

BPA is a global provider of expert managed quality services including: quality design, program outsourcing, and staff augmentation.

Whether you need advice or guidance in setting up  your quality assurance organization, maximizing the  effectiveness from your current activity, or you want to investigate how you best measure performance objectively  to drive customer engagement, our team of QA expert business partners can help.

We support you in developing your QA vision and strategy,  improving performance, and focusing on achieving specific  business outcomes. Our consultants provide in-depth  industry and technical knowledge in the areas of quality  management, form design, process excellence, customer insight, maximizing the human element in interactions, coaching and feedback, and helping you maximize contact center ROI.

BPA Quality Managed QA Solutions USA

A Friend’s Advice for Surviving Reporting

Like most of New York right now, I am currently snowed in. While everyone is waiting for the next chapter of my Adventures in Speech Analytics series, I thought it would be nice to share some friendly advice for surviving reporting.  While I specialize in Speech Analytics, I feel a majority of these tips are useful for anyone involved in the world of report writing.

A friend’s job is to listen to you vent about your problems, be the voice of reason when you are about to make an unnecessary large purchase and give you advice that 75% of the time you will not bother to listen to. With that being said, I hope my friendly advice will fall into that 25% category.

Let’s start with:

• Keep your data organized: There are 2 kinds of people- those who thrive in “organized chaos” and everyone else. If you spend enough time in Excel you may feel like you are buried beneath an avalanche of tables and charts. Label your columns clearly, color code cells and pivot your data when possible. If you have numbers all over the place you are making it more difficult by increasing your chances of having incorrect data. If you are tasked with a one-time report you need to give it the same respect you would to an ongoing report. You should be able to easily explain how the report works to others.
• Embrace your other “friends” in Reporting: Thanks to major advancements in Speech Analytics technology, many SA applications offer beautiful and easy methods to use reporting tools that can be run within the application. There is more to Speech Analytics software than ad-hoc searches.  Don’t be afraid to tinker around and test the limits of what your software can do for you. Consider speaking with your SA software account manager to see how they can work with your SA program’s reporting needs- you would be surprised at how many options they have out there that could work perfectly for you.
• Pivot! Pivot! Pivot! : Pivot tables and charts are one of my favorite ways to display data. They look sleek and are fairly easy to update. Also, get familiar with one of Pivot’s fancy accessories known as Slicers. I have found there are many people who are unfamiliar with them- FIX THAT. Slicers and Pivot go together like peanut butter and jelly- especially when you have many different categories of data you are reporting on. Slicers are one of the classiest ways to get your audience to interact and engage with the report you have worked so hard to put together.
• Always Remember the KISS principle: KISS is an acronym for “Keep it simple sweetie”. Make this your mantra each and every time you create a new report for someone. As I stated earlier you need to keep your data organized, but it is also very important to keep your data simple to read and maintain as well. Don’t make things more complicated as you already have PLENTY of things to worry about at work.
• It’s OK to be a Work In Progress: One of my hobbies is drawing. I draw every day because my brain needs to be soothed with detailed strokes of a pen against paper. In art, the more you practice the better you become. I draw much differently today than I did as a child. Now think about the first report you ever built. It probably looked less sophisticated compared to what you can create now. Report writing is a necessary chore to deliver important information to others in an organized and digestible format. Take the time to look past the numbers and charts and look at your abilities to build reports as an art form. Take Excel refresher courses (Groupon offers various online programs at steep discounts.) Share your knowledge with others and be open to learning other people’s tricks of the trade. Always be open to some sort of learning even if you think you are one of the best of the best. Chances are there is always a little something left for you to learn.

Please feel free to share any advice you may have on how to survive reporting in the comments section. I look forward to hearing from you!

By:  Diana Aviles, Operations Manager, Speech Analytics at BPA Quality

Adventures in Speech Analytics – An Introduction

A lot of people in the contact center scene have heard about Speech Analytics (SA) but do not know the purpose of the technology. Researching the topic can be overwhelming so let’s start with the basics.

What is Speech Analytics?

Speech Analytics is the technique of taking calls that have been recorded to acquire data. It is to call centers what Google is to the internet. You can search for keywords or phrases to identify specific topics or behaviors during a customer-agent interaction.

What can I use Speech Analytics for?

You can use SA for a lot of things. Say your company requires sales agents to read to the customer a disclaimer about E911 (Enhanced 911) at point of sale- you need to know the percentage of agent compliance in your sales queue. You could spend an eternity going through calls randomly and hope to find what you are looking for or you can use SA technology to search for the specific phrase you are looking for like “E911 will not function until power is restored” and examine the data for accuracy.

You can also use SA technology to improve an existing process. For example one of the biggest issues in any size call center is First Call Resolution (FCR). You want to make sure that your agents are handling your customers concerns the first time around. The more customers have to call in results in lower customer satisfaction which could result in your customers ultimately leaving you for a competitor. SA can help you identify the hot topics that trigger repeat calls and help you develop processes to resolve them.

How does a Speech Analytics tool work? How does it know to find what I am looking for?

A SA tool typically is broken down into the following functional segments:

Speech Engine- This portion does the initial analysis of audio and will convert it into a file that contains a series of phonemes or transcribed text.
Indexing- This portion improves accuracy of the speech engine. It will try to make sense of the data from the speech engine and index it for additional analysis, ad hoc searching and queries. The tools will import/ingest data from the call center’s recording system(s).
Query Engine- This is where authorized end users are able to define their queries and results they want in the SA tool.
Search- Used to perform ad hoc search terms on indexed audio files. Operates similar to a google search.
Reporting Dashboard- This is where you can go to organize system data in a customizable and easy to visually digest manner. In this area you are able to drill down and filter results to your needs.
There are 2 primary types of speech engines:

Phonetic Speech Engine- the English Language has 40 phonemes. A phonetic based SA tool will search your keywords and phrases broken down in phonemes in order to return your search results faster. Example: “an-l-it-iks” or “Foh-net-ik”. A benefit to a phonetic based SA tool is that it is not limited to a pre-defined dictionary.
Text to speech (also known as LVCSR) Engine – A text to speech tool will convert speech into text using a dictionary. It will then locate the occurrences of query words in the transcribed call. A benefit of this type of SA tool is that it creates a transcript of the customer-agent interaction.
What is a Query?

Queries are an absolute must to have in your SA tool in order to get the best results. A query is a prebuilt search that has been created within the SA tool to help an end user best refine their ad hoc searches. An organization will typically have some resources set aside who specialize in creating specific queries that are of significant value to the organization. For example a telecommunications company may want to have queries built around the core lines of business they offer in addition to having queries built for specific call drivers like payment arrangements or general inquiries. Typically queries should validate at 90% accuracy to be considered functional as it will reduce the amount of false positives and missed hits.

What is an ad hoc search?

An ad hoc search is a custom search performed within the SA tool. This is the exciting aspect of speech analytics as your options for what you can search for are relatively limitless. Ad hoc searches are the core of any SA program because they allow your organization to deep dive into the heart of your customer-agent interactions. Generally the best way to ad hoc search is when they are run concurrently with an existing relevant query within the system to vet out the best results. Keep in mind that you will need to validate the accuracy of your results to ensure that you are gathering the most relevant results for your ad hoc search. Further elaboration on the ad hoc search process will be discussed in the next article.

As you can see there is a lot of power that a good speech analytics program has to offer. There is an increasing need for contact centers to deliver better customer experiences along with reducing cost and improving agent performance. People are now starting to understand that a customer interaction is a revenue generating asset that contains a vast amount of insight data that needs to be tapped into, understood and acted on.

See you soon in part 2 of Adventures in Speech Analytics when we take a closer look at queries and the ad hoc search process and strategies within a speech analytics tool.

Written by: Diana Aviles, Operations Manager, Speech Analytics at BPA Quality