After 2 million phone calls, we got the answer we needed

Picture this. You’re receiving thousands of calls from your customers each day. Each minute of every call provides an opportunity for you to resolve an issue before it becomes a complaint. A chance to give callers the information they need quickly, or spot a vulnerable customer and make sure they’re treated with extra care.

Of course not every call will be handled perfectly, but that’s where the review process comes in – allowing you to identify those calls that perhaps shouldn’t have happened or customers who might need follow-up support.

There’s just one problem. When you’re receiving millions of calls each year, how can you find the time to sift through them all and spot those that really need a second look? It would take an army of reviewers, and businesses just can’t afford this. It’s why most organizations are actually only able to manually review approximately 1% of all the calls they receive.

When we were approached by one of our insurance clients to help them review over 2 million customer interactions and around 250,000 hours of calls, we knew that technology had to hold the answer. Using our venturing capability, we brought together our voice analysts, risk specialists, data scientists and developers to build a piece of software that helped deliver the project. We managed to achieve 90% accuracy with machine-learning when assessing customer compliance outcomes. We were also able to use the solution to run the data through 21 different review scenarios at pace, something that would have been almost impossible had we been tackling the problem with humans.

Fast forward 3 years, and that early piece of software has become TrueVoice – a sophisticated voice analytics solution, used by businesses across the world. It gives them a smarter way to listen to and review calls, going from a 1% manual coverage to a 100% automated coverage. And with machine learning models built-in to analyze customers’ behavior and emotion, TrueVoice is able to quickly sift through millions of calls and identify the ones that need further attention. Whilst the original use case was all about highlighting potential non-compliance, TrueVoice has now evolved to help businesses also spot opportunities to improve customer experience, contact center operations and call agent performance. Essentially, it finds the needles in the haystack, allowing our clients to focus their time on turning that insight into action.