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Transcription Enables a Great Customer Journey

August 2025

The best scenario for customers and organizations alike is fully resolving an interaction during the first contact, ideally via self-service, or with live agent input when necessary. (This is because self-service is rapidly becoming consumers’ channel of choice globally, as well as being the most cost-effective and efficient inquiry handling method for most businesses.) Attaining this objective necessitates uniform access to real-time and historical data regarding the customer and their inquiry for every system and agent managing the interaction. However, as applications, employees, and customers consume information differently, it must be shared in an appropriate manner for each live or automated situation, purpose, and channel.

Transcription is an essential contact center data source as it feeds information in real-time directly to agents and multiple systems and applications. It has been an enabling contact center technology for decades, but the addition of generative AI (GenAI) has boosted its accuracy rates (which are now frequently 90% or higher) and increased its benefits. The following use cases highlight how transcription helps pave the way to an optimized customer journey:

  • Conversation analytics solutions are fueled by transcribed voice and digital interactions, enabling them to passively deliver meaningful data concerning customer intent, effort, sentiment, emotion, and satisfaction to enhance the customer experience (CX), significantly reducing – or eliminating – the need to actively survey consumers to capture these insights.
  • Real-time guidance (RTG) applications leverage transcriptions to deliver the right knowledge content, procedures, scripts, or directions to agents during live interactions, allowing them to spend their time focusing on what the customer said and helping them instead of looking for information. RTG also decreases the need to put customers on hold or transfer them to other resources – avoiding two activities consumers greatly dislike.
  • Next-best-action (NBA) capabilities provide targeted prompts for new sales, up-sell, cross-sell, customer retention, collections, or other purposes, based on real-time transcriptions of ongoing conversations; these applications make recommendations that are best for the customer and organization.
  • Automated quality management (AQM) solutions utilize transcription to review up to 100% of interactions across voice and digital channels, score agents’ ability to deliver an outstanding CX, and gain actionable insights into customer needs and wants to improve the overall customer journey.
  • Automated post-interaction summarization capabilities leverage GenAI to extract key data from omnichannel conversation transcripts and quickly create comprehensive, yet concise, account notations and identify follow-up items from the interaction to help ensure customer commitments are met.
  • Self-service solutions increasingly deliver full transcripts and contextual summarizations when the application is unable to complete the interaction, improving live agent handoffs and enhancing the customer journey when moving from agentless to agent-assisted conversations. Transcripts are also leveraged to train self-service solutions to increase the range of customer intents they can accurately handle.

An effective servicing infrastructure that enables inquiries and transactions to be addressed quickly, accurately, effortlessly, and cost-effectively is essential for a successful CX. Transcription technology is a key element of the experience.