Play on words

For call center customer service reps, fielding calls from irate customers is all in a day's work. Now, though, service providers can anticipate angry callers and even learn from them with new emotion detection technology available through NICE Systems' digital call recording systems and their related consulting services.

When customers are greeted with the standard, “This call is being recorded for quality assurance purposes,” chances are good that NICE is recording the call and compiling data, scrutinizing it to improve CSRs' performance and to evaluate customers' experience and concerns.

The system works through a combination of call recording and word recognition. NICE tracks callers' emotion through speaker separation — separating what the customer says from what the CSR says. During the beginning of the call, a specific segment of the call is recorded and given a baseline score. If the customer becomes upset during the course of the call, his speech will change, and the new pattern receives a different score for the new emotion level.

NICE uses a search engine to interpret the results of the recordings through what the company calls word spotting. Call center managers can enter specific words into the engine to determine their frequency and spot widespread problems. For example, if the word “cancel” appears in a call, that account would be flagged, and CSRs can work to rectify the situation before it escalates.

“We encourage the customers to record all calls because only then can they extract this meaningful data,” said Noam Koren, NICE product marketing manager. “Within those calls, there is a gold mine of information for people to understand what the pains of customers are and try to address them. It's helping the agents to improve themselves and helping the business to meet its objectives.”

Koren says the system can help businesses catch opportunities that might go unnoticed. For example, client FedEx Custom Critical opened a new line of business in Mexico based on recorded customer comments.

“The information was there all the time, but no one was listening to that,” he said. “They were working with and interacting with customers, but nobody thought about analyzing this information and going one step further.”

Sometimes the most insignificant sounding words can have value. For instance, FedEX added the word “wow” to their word-spotting lexicon to flag any call where that word is mentioned, said NICE spokesperson Virginia Flood.

“It could be positive or negative, but ‘wow’ is an indication of some sort of excitement,” she said. “It's valuable for them to hear those calls from a marketing standpoint or from a quality standpoint to know if they either did exceptionally well or exceptionally badly with a particular client.”