Speech analytics tools allow companies to automatically screen calls that a call center might not otherwise be able to review manually. Businesses can gather actionable insights from all interactions, rather than from a smaller percentage of calls, allowing them to uncover information that might only rarely come up in voluntary surveys. They can uncover trends and identify issues and address them quickly to improve quality and prevent measurable declines in the customer experience. The results can also be used to impact sales and marketing initiatives and highlight any operational issues in the contact center.
The call center analytics field, especially for speech analytics, is one of the fastest-growing segments in the call center management technology market. Let’s look at what speech analytics is and how the business insights it produces impact the contact center and the customer experience.
What is Speech Analytics?
In the world of call center analytics, speech analytics is used to analyze voice recordings (post-call speech analytics) or live customer calls (real-time speech analytics) to gather insights into customer needs and behaviors.
Call center speech analytics software identifies words and phrases, based on a library defined by the user. This type of call analytics can be used to detect trends in customer interactions and analyzes audio patterns to detect emotions and stress in a speaker’s voice.
Uses of Speech Analytics in Call Centers
Companies can learn about customer preferences, or about desired product and service features that competitors may offer, which can be useful in refining the overall customer experience. It can go even deeper to help determine the moment when an agent closes the sale or resolves an issue, or when the customer loses interest. A simple review of the conversations that close a sale or turn an unhappy customer into a happy one can lead to script changes or coaching moments that can improve customer outcomes.
In addition, many call center analytics tools also include sentiment analysis that can determine whether customers are happy, angry or indifferent. Sentiment analysis evaluates the language used, as well as voice inflections (by measuring how loud a customer speaks), the rate of speech, the amount of stress in their voice and any changes.
Conversations analytics is an even more-evolved version of the technology. It can help explore overall attitudes and opinions and help identify specific customers that are likely to churn. By doing so, companies can quickly adapt to improve products, services and processes that can result in a better customer experience.
Real-time versus Post-call Analytics
Real-time speech analytics tools can be used during a call to provide agents with guidance, such as suggesting a response to a question, reminding them to read legal disclaimers, prompting them for a next step, or even notifying a supervisor that an agent might need assistance.
Analyst Michael Finneran details the rise of real-world implementations and the benefits of AI and real-time analytics for customer interactions. Specifically in the contact center space, these tools can affect agent occupancy, RPCs and other metrics relating to contact center costs and returns. Ultimately, this translates into improved business outcomes, better agent effectiveness and overall contact center performance.
Post-call speech analytics analyzes call recordings using different methods. One method is to convert the data into phonemes – the smallest unit of human speech. Users can then search large volumes of recorded audio quickly, accurately and with contextual relevance. Searches using phoneme pattern matching are executed on all words and phrases including blended words, proper names, slang, code words, nonstandard grammar patterns and ad-hoc use of different languages. The results can be viewed in easy-to-use dashboards to help users drill down into and filter information.
5 Benefits of Using Speech Analytics Tools
“What happens in the contact center, stays in the contact center,” is an outdated and no-gain philosophy. Speech analytics reveals a treasure trove of information from conversations between contact center agents and customers that is just too valuable “not” to share with the rest of the organization. Here are the top five benefits for businesses.
1. Reduces customer churn
2. Boosts contact center productivity and reduces costs
3. Mitigates compliance and risk
4. Improves agent performance and goal attainment
5. Reduces agent churn
Fuel Improvement Across the Enterprise
Speech analytics can uncover insights that are just too good to keep within the contact center. They should also be shared with the rest of the organization. Here’s how insights from conversations with customers in the contact center can help other departments improve their performance and the customer experience at every touchpoint throughout the customer journey.
- Hone marketing messages and improve campaign results
- Provide insights for product development
- Reduce bottlenecks and fine-tune operations
- Accelerate sales and increase revenue
With speech analytics, contact centers can get to insights fairly quickly. Since it monitors and reports on all conversations, it automatically takes the raw data, organizes and analyzes it and generates insights based on what companies want to track. When this information is applied, it can result in dramatic improvements in contact center efficiency, agent productivity, customer satisfaction, and reduce costs as well as both agent and customer churn. All of which are essential to providing exceptional customer experiences and increasing revenue and profits.
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