The use of scripts in the contact centre can bring businesses many benefits, reducing agent training time and helping eliminate errors and compliance issues; supporting better customer engagement while promoting consistency in customer service.  Yet, there are also many pitfalls in rolling out a call scripting strategy. And where businesses do get things wrong, they can end up irritating customers, alienating them altogether or becoming non-compliant with the latest rules and regulations.
Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of the latest speech analytics technology.  Here we assess two common issues with call scripting and consider how they can be resolved with the help of real-time speech analytics.

Common Mistake – Creating scripted monologues
One of the most frequent mistakes businesses make in this area is building unnecessarily long agent monologues into scripts, thereby offering little opportunity for interaction or engagement with the customer. The latest speech analytics technology helps address this issue by evaluating the speech ratio of calls in real time; identifying those scripts that don’t allow for a proper dialogue, or input from the customer, and then modifying them accordingly.

Common Mistake – Following script but failing to respond to ad hoc questions
Another common issue is when the agent follows the script successfully but then fails to respond effectively to questions or remarks from the customer which are off script.

Again, real-time speech analytics can provide an effective solution, by evaluating dialogue pairs consisting of a phrase and a predefined answer, which can be used to ensure the agent is giving a correct response to questions such as ‘is there an early repayment charge?’ as well as ensuring that the customer is confirming agreements for compliance reasons.

Taken together, these examples demonstrate that call scripting can offer an extensive range of benefits for customer-facing businesses today. Yet, if they want to make sure these benefits don’t turn into drawbacks, real-time speech analytics is an essential requirement.

Emily Bloomfield
EMEA Marketing Manager
Enghouse Interactive UK