Acquired by the Webhelp group in 2017, Telecats is a Dutch-born publisher, founded in 1997. From its beginnings as a voice-servers business, the company has made remarkable progress towards AI* by including machine learning in its own real-time speech processing technology. Through Telecats, Webhelp already uses the voice of the customer to automatically trigger certain actions. Voicebots make it possible to understand a customer request, classify it, and provide a solution.
Another option is to transcribe the full conversation and analyse it to help identify areas for improvement, or to speed up the advisor’s work by entering data in the CRM for them. With this technology, the voice of the customer becomes not only a vector of automation, but also a source of multiple improvements, for the benefit of the advisor, the brand and, therefore, the end customer.
* Telecats named as an Exceptional AI Solutions Provider by Frost & Sullivan
1. Understanding words
After the tone, please tell us the reason for your call in one sentence. «Hello, I have a problem with my bill from March». This call is automatically routed to the appropriate advisor, Who sees the initial request and the associated business process on their screen before taking the call, as well as the customer file and the March invoice. Simple and effective! This solution, smart IVR, makes it possible to replace IVRs, which are very irritating for customers.
At Dutch telecom operator KPN, the solution has been in place for several years and more than 150 types of customer questions are included. Smart IVR is also deployed by MSD France, where the names of drugs, among other things, are recognized, saving time in every interaction!
Also… Specific words or product names are interpreted and processed automatically.
2. Responding automatically
When the caller’s oral request is fairly basic, an automatic response can be provided via a voicebot. For example: «Is Aérius available to order for pharmacies right now?», will trigger an answer like «yes, Aérius is available». Or, for example: «no, it will be available from 15 September». This solution, in operation at MSD France, is directly connected to the product availability database.
Also… Even if the brand has high standards for quality of response, automation can be useful, for example to better manage seasonality or call spikes.
3. Transcribing calls
The technology can also operate during the call between the customer and their advisor; their conversation is automatically transcribed with Telecats’ Speech-to-Text technology. Instead of an audio recording, a text file is created. The technology adapts to the specific characteristics of the applicant (language, keywords, profession, product catalogue, etc.). These transcripts can then be analysed from several perspectives; statistical operations to analyse trends, detection of irritants, training needs or more analysis of compliance.
Also… An immense amount of relevant information becomes available to brands for thorough statistical operations and fast, targeted, and factual decision-making.
4. Summarising calls
This Speech-to-Text technology makes it possible to automatically record a written summary of the call in the CRM without asking the advisor to make the effort to write it down. In addition, Telecats’ Spoken Summary solution will detect when the advisor summarizes the important points of their conversation to the customer, categorize it, and automatically inject them into the CRM. In short, well-written and actionable conversation verbatims allow for improvements in decision-making and significant savings in time!
Also… The agent is relieved of the repetitive and time-consuming task of producing a call summary and completing the associated fields in the CRM and can focus on the conversation with their customer.
Mathieu Jougla, Managing Director of Telecats:
“With the automatic analysis of the human voice, the contact centre becomes a real contributor of data that’s rich and easily analysed”.
The democratisation of Speech-to-Text and human-language comprehension technologies will continue to open up many possibilities. To unlock competitiveness levers, brands initially leapt – rightly – at the opportunity for automation that these solutions offer, but their potential does not end there. Customer experience managers have long been frustrated with having to base their decisions on partial data due to the material and financial impossibility of asking each advisor to complete the CRM according to their needs.
The Voice of the Customer, a subject so expensive in our industry, thus becomes factual and affordable. The contact centre is finally becoming a crucial source of usable data for brand decision making… which opens new avenues! We will soon be able to cross-reference the data in the call transcript – “what is said” – with the signals in the recording of the call (who speaks quickly, who speaks loudly or quietly, who changes during the call) in short, “how it is said”, and it is by combining the two that we can finally truly understand what they mean to us.