Enter the Dragon.
Dragon has long been a critical productivity tool for millions of healthcare professionals worldwide—and it’s coming soon to a contact center near you!
Eric La Scola, Solutions Marketing Manager for Dragon Professional at Nuance, reveals how Dragon speech recognition technology is set to accelerate contact center efficiency and effectiveness while improving its overall economics.
Contact centers are some of the most metrics-driven organizations around, capturing and monitoring every moment of time spent on every interaction. But that relentless focus on the numbers can create tension between seemingly conflicting priorities.
On one side, there’s constant pressure to optimize efficiency, productivity, and costs. And on the other side, there’s the imperative to provide outstanding customer experiences.
True, these priorities aren’t always in conflict; reducing Average Handle Time (AHT) will have a positive impact on customer experience—if it results in faster resolutions rather than just faster calls. It comes down to where the emphasis lies between efficiency and quality—yet the smartest contact center leaders know they need to focus equally on both.
While my colleagues across Nuance are helping contact centers improve both efficiency and quality with conversational AI, the team spotted a new opportunity to help agents become even more productive—and improve customer experience at the same time.
One of the most significant drains on an agent’s time is completing call wrap-up reports. It’s a vital activity for compliance, training, and identifying customer journey bottlenecks, and each call summary must be completed quickly, accurately, and in enough detail to be useful.
There are parallels here with the millions of healthcare professionals who use Dragon speech recognition software to complete clinical documentation faster and more accurately, helping increase productivity and improve patient outcomes. There’s a reason 90 percent of US hospitals deploy a Nuance healthcare solution (including Dragon)— they know dictating patient stories is three times faster than typing them—and equally important, dictating delivers valuable immediacy and detail.
So, our team came up with the idea of using Dragon Professional Group in contact centers to help agents accelerate call wrap-ups. Importantly, it’s not the off-the-shelf version available to consumers—it’s an enterprise-grade version of Dragon software that includes the backend integration, centralized management, and ongoing support that large organizations need.
In speaking with customers, the ROI of Dragon for contact centers is apparent. Agents can reduce AHT by an average of 5-6 percent per call. Scale that up to hundreds of agents, and over a year, it amounts to huge time—and cost— savings. Using Dragon, agents also capture more call detail and specificity, which will help expedite future resolutions of similar issues.
Alongside these efficiency and productivity benefits, Dragon will also help contact center leaders reduce onboarding times for new agents, helping them become productive much faster by using voice commands instead of typing.
The use of Dragon in contact centers reveals another crucial benefit that will help improve the customer experience.
Because dictating notes with Dragon removes the need for agents to be fast, accurate typists, it broadens the talent pools available to contact center leaders. Candidates who have outstanding customer service skills but poor typing skills may previously have been rejected, but now they can become valued members of a high-performing team.
Now that Dragon has entered the contact center, we’re excited to see how our customers combine Dragon with other Nuance technologies to improve efficiency and quality in the contact center and beyond. It’s a powerful combination of AI tech that promises to revolutionize the economics of customer service—so watch this space!