What Customers Say And How They Say It

Wireless carriers, financial services firms and insurance providers are hardly rendered helpless by angry consumers. But many of them are beginning to realize that they're not hearing what customers are saying despite having armies of customer service agents.

Most companies that use call centers sample a small percentage of conversations to make sure agents are following scripts and for general quality and training purposes. Being able to analyze all calls can offer a more complete picture of what customers are saying, such as why they are defecting to a competitor.

"Agents aren't recording that. Senior management never hears it. . . . Surveys don't do it. Quality monitoring doesn't do it," said Ted Lubowsky, president of worldwide sales for Utopy Inc., a speech analytic vendor in San Francisco. "They're not listening to the customer, and the customer is dropping all this wisdom."

One simple way speech analytics can help consumers is by making it easier for companies to figure out if a complaint is isolated or part of a systemic problem. For instance, if a company starts getting a lot of calls about a defective product, the company knows it has a problem, said Bill Andrews, general manager of self-service speech solutions for Convergys Corp., a leading outsourcer of call centers.

"By addressing the root cause, you can eliminate calls coming into the contact center," he said.

Janet Ryan, call center director for AAA of Washington/Inland, which operates a travel agency in Washington state, had heard complaints about a vendor AAA buys travel services from but had nothing to substantiate those concerns. Using software by a Melville, N.Y., company called Verint Systems Inc., she searched calls mentioning that vendor and found that the average duration was 30 minutes because her agents were being put on hold.

AAA has asked the vendor to change its Web site so AAA agents can make changes online without having to wait to talk to a person.

The question is whether any of these technologies will make the customer service experience better for consumers, Dawson said.

Some customer service experts have heard many of the same promises before and are skeptical.

"What's prevented the same improvements from cascading down earlier?" said Scott Broetzmann, president of Customer Care Measurement and Consulting. "They had the same tools before, albeit in a different format."

"A lot of these tools are seen as panaceas. A piece of technology is not going to solve a fundamentally flawed business or customer service practices," such as insisting on talking customers out of canceling services instead of just doing as they ask, Dawson said.

"You still have to navigate the political landscape of companies to make changes," Broetzmann said.

Before talking about deploying "jazzy new technology," companies should make sure they are making full use of technology that exists, said Paul English, founder of GetHuman.com, a Web site that offers consumers unpublicized phone numbers and other short cuts for reaching customer service agents.

"In order to give people dignity, you have to give them choice," English said. "The phone designers don't give you a choice. They jam you down the throat of the machine."

Speech analytics and emotion detection already can help make call center interaction less impersonal by alerting a supervisor to step in if a caller starts to get upset. But few companies use it that way -- preferring instead to look for patterns -- because paying humans to answer the phone costs as much as 10 times more than operating an automated phone system. "There are not enough supervisors around to handle all these emotional calls," said Daniel Ziv, Verint's director of business analytics.