Speech analytics used for coaching innovations 

Professional Planning Forum recognises Ventura for demonstrating benefits of speech technology to enhance quality and performance management 

Ventura a leading contact centre outsourcer in the UK has won a prestigious Contact Centre Innovation Award for pioneering the use of speech analytics in its operations.

 The award recognises Ventura’s innovative use of speech analytics to focus performance coaching on key areas the company has identified for improvement.  It highlights the fact that by using Nexidia speech analytics, Ventura has reduced Average Handle Time (AHT) by twenty-five seconds, cut silent time by six percent, reduced repeat calls by ten percent in four months for one of their clients, and saved over £1.3m in annual operations costs. 

  “Call centre coaching has followed the same pattern for many years,” explained Paul Smedley, Executive Director of the Professional Planning Forum. “Speech analytics offers a chance to radically change this to focus on the customers’ experience in much more detail. There are very few companies making this happen and every contact centre can learn a lot from the way Ventura have applied this pioneering technology and the results they have achieved.”

 Smedley adds:  “Whilst small sample call monitoring and generic coaching was best practice 10 years ago, today’s speech analytics technology can provide a complete view of all calls and allow us to accurately understand the customer experience. Being able to focus on specific issues and use the voice of the customer is really impactful on agent coaching. Speech analytics has an important part to play in moving quality and performance management to the next level by enabling us to put the customer at the heart of how we do business.”

 Ventura use speech analytics to extract business intelligence from call recordings and uncover inefficiencies such as increased AHT, silent time, or factors driving repeat calls.  Analysing 750,000 calls every month across a range of clients, the company transforms this intelligence into focused coaching and training needs for individual customer service advisors (CSAs), and also uses it to re-engineer more efficient call processes. By applying intelligence gathered from such a large base of recordings, Ventura's speech analytics implementation saves them more than £1.3m in annual operating costs, which are economic returns that could never be realised by using a traditional quality management approach.