Senior leadership teams at most global contact center outsourcers are constantly under pressure. They need to have a laser like focus on key metrics, SLAs and people to manage their businesses. They are increasingly managing a global distributed business that is both labor intensive and technology intensive. And they have to do all of this with increasingly tight margins.

Despite being measured on metrics like CSAT and NPS, a lot of the value that an outsourcer delivers to its clients is often hard to quantify. And too often the price realized by the outsourcer does not capture the value and quality an outsourcer provides.

Two Ideas to pivot into high value SaaS offerings

In this article I would like to propose two new innovative ideas that can help Contact Center BPOs pivot into new SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) revenues.

1. CX Speech Insights Service: Develop a new branded realtime CX insights service based on speech analytics powered by deep learning.
2. CX Speech Automation Service: Build new voice self-service applications that can automate some of the common customer care scenarios.

Both these offerings can be offered to the clients using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based business model in conjunction with the traditional agent side of the business.

Both these SaaS offerings leverage some of the key strengths that BPOs have: Deep domain expertise, in depth understanding of customer issues and technology infrastructure that leverages both

1. CX Speech Insights Service

Contact centers have a treasure trove of audio data. Every day associates are handling thousands of calls across a wide variety of topics. While outsourcers use legacy speech analytics vendors, the traditional use has been to analyze a sample of calls to assist in the Quality Assurance function. Net-net, it is viewed as a cost center both for the outsourcers and their clients.

However there is a massive untapped opportunity to mine and extract insights from such audio data for uses well beyond quality assurance. Such insights may be relevant to stakeholders in Product and Marketing teams of the clients. This can open up new non-traditional product and marketing budgets for BPOs.

2. CX Speech Automation Service

Outsourcers have an in-depth deeper understanding of current topics that customers are calling about. They have unique and current insights into which categories of calls are actually driving volumes. With the right tools, methodologies and personnel, outsourcers can build and offer new innovative speech self service applications that may automate parts of calls. With the right technologies, outsourcers can move seamlessly between agent assisted calls and automated self-service interactions.

The Foundation: Deep Neural Networks & custom acoustic models

The foundation for these SaaS offerings are modern Deep Neural Network (DNN) based Speech to Text platforms.

The old speech to text were technologies were based on traditional statistical models (called HMMs and GMMs). They were limited in their ability to train on specific industry jargons and accents. But a DNN based platform has the following advantages

1. A DNN based platform can be easily trained to recognize unique words/jargon, accents and noisy backgrounds. Training the models increases the quality of recognition and makes it accurate enough to deliver real value to client stakeholders.
2. A industry or customer specific acoustic model has the potential to create intellectual property for the BPO.
3. A DNN platform can be used equally well both in the up front automation part and in the analytics and notification service. There are benefits from using the same platform for both offerings.

For more info, please contact us at info@voicegain.ai.

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