From reactive to proactive – How capturing live audio can enhance your contact centre operations 

The contact centre can be quite a reactive environment.

Agents reacting to what customers say, analysts or supervisors reacting to interactions they’ve listened to, days, or potentially weeks after the event, and contact centre leaders reacting to performance metrics that are funnelled (slowly) upwards through the chain of command. 

Wouldn’t it be great if the contact centre could step on to the front foot and proactively manage their interactions, analytics and core KPIs? 

“Yes, Andrew!” I hear you all cry. 

Well, a key enabler of proactive contact centre performance management is having the ability to capture live audio from customer interactions. An accessible live audio feed unlocks a world of opportunity for the contact centre and can be used to guide agents, identify process improvements, and strengthen decision making. 

In this article, we explore why capturing live audio is so beneficial and how you can start being more proactive with your contact centre performance management. 

What is live audio capture? 

Live audio capture is the process of listening to both sides of a customer conversation in real time. The audio stream can then be transcribed and analysed (also in real time) in order to power deep conversational analytics, smoother agent guidance, and better decision making. 

Why capture live audio? 

Simply because it’s really useful. 

Most contact centres don’t currently have the ability to capture live audio, which, unbeknownst to them, is a major blocker when it comes to performance improvement.  

Live audio can tell you so much. 

Here are a few of the benefits I’ve seen contact centres experience through live audio capture: 

• Data at your fingertips – Capturing live audio is a great way to collect real-time performance data points. Whether that be spikes in conversation topics, gauging the mood of agents and customers, or tracking key KPI, like CSAT and AHT, with live audio capture you can build out real-time performance dashboards and become much more reactive as issues arise. 
• Happier, more productive agents – Live audio can be used to guide agents in a more effective way. By listening to conversations live, courses of action can be suggested to agents in the form of live prompts and alerts. Repetitive tasks can also be eliminated, such as summarising a customer interaction. 
• Faster, smarter decisions – Possibly the most crucial improvement a contact centre can make when they capture live audio is to speed up decision making. By accelerating this process with reliable and accessible data insights then a contact centre truly starts to transition from a reactive state to a proactive entity. 

Agnostic Audio Services from Awaken Intelligence 

I’ve covered the fact that very few contact centres have the ability to capture their audio in real time. Most of the time it is captured but hidden away in some black-box technological process awaiting manual sampling by an under supported QA team. 

Often this creates huge amounts of inefficiency and can be a resource drain. 

The audio service from Awaken is one hundred percent agnostic. That means regardless of what technical infrastructure a contact centre has in place we can capture and transcribe live audio from their customer conversations. 

Our technology “listens” live to customer interactions, accurately transcribes the conversation, and analyses the results, all in real time. 

The data insights produced can then be used to power a range of functions, such as agent prompts and guidance, process improvements, or agent performance analysis. 

Importantly, it is taking steps like capturing live audio that will help organisations build 

For more information, visit https://www.awaken.io/products/live-audio-capture/.