Sharpen elevates the contact center customer experience with Deepgram

The Landscape

Better Customer Service Starts With Better Tools for the Agent

Sharpen is disrupting the traditional contact center with a cloud-based, agent-centric platform that simplifies customer service interactions and serves over 200 global customers. As a result of COVID-19 and the urgent shift to a remote workforce, better customer experiences are more critical than ever.

To boost customer interactions, Sharpen first focuses on the agents. “We believe that a better agent experience leads to a better customer experience, and that starts with providing agents with the tools and resources they need in one place,” said Adam Settle, Vice President of Product at Sharpen. “If an agent is frustrated due to navigating many screens, then that behavior may negatively affect the customer. But if the agent has the right tools at their fingertips and uses technology to take care of their customers, it will make a big difference.”

The Challenge

Getting the Value Out of ASR

One of the most crucial tools in the arsenal of contact center solutions is automatic speech recognition (ASR). Sharpen supervisors, quality assurance and operations team members alike rely on ASR to identify coaching and training opportunities for agents, and maintain compliance with their customers. Prior to Deepgram, Sharpen used a solution that relied on older speech-to-text methods (tri-gram model) and offered less accurate transcriptions as a result. When one of Sharpen’s biggest customers raised concerns about the ASR’s transcription quality, Sharpen set out to find a replacement tool that would meet its needs.

The Solution

Increasing Transcription Quality and Speed, Thanks to Deepgram

Deciding to try another vendor, Sharpen started its journey with Deepgram by feeding hours of existing calls into Deepgram’s general audio model, and immediately noticed a significant improvement in transcription quality. Deepgram’s ability to auto-learn and facilitate the creation of custom voice recognition models made the decision a no-brainer for Sharpen. “When we compared the result to our previous solution, the difference was night and day,” said Settle. “The trained model feature was especially a game changer for our customers, as they could generate even more accurate transcriptions based on the type of data or keywords that mattered most to them.”

Unlike other ASR solutions on the market, Deepgram completely rebuilt the speech processing stack and is the only speech recognition company powered by end-to-end deep learning. Deepgram’s deep learning approach constantly enables the transcriptions to continuously improve, delivering even greater accuracy and understanding over time.