Many businesses miss out on valuable insights due to inaccurate transcription in their call centers. This highlights the crucial role that transcription accuracy plays in the success of a business.
Companies are now using conversation intelligence and quality assurance (QA) automation solutions to extract insights from frontline interactions in call centers. However, one critical element that is often overlooked is transcription accuracy.
Recording customer calls is standard practice for contact centers, as they understand the valuable data that can be gained from these interactions.
Each conversation can contain essential information for driving growth, revenue, and customer satisfaction.
Failure to extract this data is a missed opportunity. To mine customer calls at scale, a system that accurately transcribes them is necessary.
Unfortunately, many leaders assume their voice-to-text transcription systems work correctly, but most are more error-prone than they realize. This leads to downstream inaccuracies and missed value. Therefore, it is crucial to shed light on this critical weakness in contact center operations.
This article discusses eight reasons why customer call transcription accuracy is vital to businesses.
The importance of transcription accuracy in call centers is often underestimated, yet it is a crucial factor in maximizing their value.
The accuracy of call transcription is crucial for downstream automation and analysis, yet many businesses have unstable foundations when it comes to transcription accuracy.
For instance, if your voice-to-text transcription system fails to accurately transcribe your company name, such as rendering CB Health as “see bee health,” you miss out on vital information.
Similarly, if the system transcribes critical information like “address” as “a dress” or “at rest,” you lose the ability to analyze compliance or track agent performance.
These errors can quickly add up across thousands of calls, leading to flawed dashboards and undermining training, customer support, and business goals.
However, investing in a conversation intelligence platform with high transcription accuracy, along with following steps to ensure accuracy, can significantly enhance contact center operations, from quality assurance to customer satisfaction.
How to define transcription accuracy
Measuring transcription accuracy is not just about a simple percentage. While many contact center recording solutions claim to have an accuracy rate of 85-90%, these numbers can be misleading.
It’s important to take into account the environment in which the accuracy was measured, such as a perfectly clean audio recording or a real-world contact center with background noise and overlapping conversations between customers and agents.
Additionally, it’s crucial to consider what is included in the percentage that is captured correctly and what is missed.
Even a 1% loss of customer call data due to an inaccurate transcription or analysis could be the 1% that holds the most important information.
For instance, if the system fails to pick up a brand name, analysts won’t have access to that data. Quality is also a vital factor since a truly accurate transcription can capture tone, context, and sentiment, which offers insights into the underlying meaning of every moment within a call.
Having discussed the meaning of transcription accuracy, it is now imperative to highlight the top eight reasons why it is critical for your business.
8 ways superior transcription accuracy benefits businesses.
Although poor transcription accuracy can cause significant issues, the positive aspect is that high accuracy is achievable, and it can turn your call centers into a vital source of strategic value in the eight ways described below.
- Obtain precise analysis of trends in your business.
Contact centers handle thousands of calls every month, making it crucial for leaders to have a comprehensive view of their operations. This visibility is essential to improving agent performance, increasing operational efficiency, identifying new product opportunities, and more. - Guarantee adherence to regulations and confidentiality.
Major companies have become increasingly vulnerable to data breaches. For instance, Microsoft revealed a significant breach in 2020, which involved many call logs from customer service. The impact was reduced by redaction of some sensitive information, but the attackers were still able to obtain readable data.
Failure to comply with regulations and protect privacy can result in hefty fines and damage to reputation, and achieving high transcription accuracy is crucial for contact center performance in this regard. If your system cannot accurately identify whether agents are asking the proper security questions, you may be at risk of regulatory violations.
Additionally, new technologies can automatically redact sensitive information such as credit card numbers, but this is only possible if the system can transcribe the conversation accurately and in context. - Automation and scaling of call analysis
The automation and scaling of call analysis have become possible with recent advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning systems.
Many businesses make decisions based on evaluations of only a small percentage of calls, usually around 2%, without knowing if the information reflects an actual trend. With accurate transcripts, businesses can now rely on more comprehensive data sets to make better decisions.
However, when the transcripts are inaccurate, the machine cannot recognize the words or sentiment of the conversation, leading to scaling analysis based on false data, which can be detrimental to the business. - Enabling searchable insights
For leaders and analysts to effectively search their conversation intelligence system, it is crucial that the transcripts are accurate. This allows them to search for keywords and important issues to determine how frequently a particular question, concern, or problem arises.
However, if the transcripts are incorrect, such searches cannot be performed.
Moreover, it is not only the accuracy of the text that matters. Searching by speaker, context, and sentiment is also essential. Speaker recognition is especially important for effective search results, as the meaning of a word or phrase can differ significantly depending on whether it was spoken by an agent or a customer. - Exploring business concerns and possibilities
Having low transcription accuracy means that you are likely to miss essential details about your business, such as where you need to focus your attention
For instance, are customers experiencing issues with your products or services? Is your website down, or are there billing problems?
On the other hand, are many customers requesting new products, services, or features that you could potentially develop and sell?
By accurately transcribing your conversations, you gain a significant advantage in identifying and addressing both problems and opportunities within your business. - Enhanced Sales and Customer Experience
According to studies, a single negative experience can drive away 80% of customers to a competitor. Without a clear understanding of what customers are saying, it’s impossible to improve their experience.
By having accurate transcriptions, you can quickly identify the best sales practices and scripts, as well as common objections, questions, and upsell opportunities.
High transcription accuracy, coupled with fast AI call analysis, can also provide you with the chance to turn around a negative situation, or at least learn from it and prevent future incidents. - Success of employees
The success of your employees is crucial to the success of your contact center. Your agents are on the front lines of your operations, and they depend on you to provide them with the necessary tools and support to perform their jobs effectively.
Low transcription accuracy can negatively impact agent coaching and training, leading to poor performance metrics such as low net-promoter scores and high long-handle times.
Conversely, accurate transcriptions enable precise agent evaluations and the opportunity to provide them with the necessary support to enhance their performance. - Employee retention and morale
Employee retention and morale are important factors for a contact center’s success. High agent turnover can lead to significant costs, and it’s a common problem for many contact center leaders. A report by CCW found that one in three leaders consider high agent turnover as one of their biggest pain points.
By ensuring high transcription accuracy, you can provide accurate assessments of your agents’ performance, leading to appropriate training and development opportunities. This can help avoid wrongful reprimands or terminations and show employees that they are valued through bonuses and promotions. Providing effective coaching to help employees grow and succeed can also contribute to a positive work environment and improve employee retention.
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