What are the benefits of speech analytics for contact centers?
What speech analytics is and why your contact center needs it
The main benefits of speech analytics in your contact center are quality assurance, training and efficiently utilizing data to make operational decisions.
Speech analytics is the process of analyzing voice recordings or live customer calls. It refers to the technology that transcribes speech and then analyzes the conversation through special speech recognition software. The purpose is to gather useful customer information in a simple and automated way.
While this used to be focused on transcriptions, it has developed into so much more. Speech analytics software identifies words and analyzes audio patterns to detect emotions and stress in a speaker’s voice.
You can also use a word cloud to have access to an overview of what topics are trending in the contact center conversations. Are you getting a sudden increase of questions about invoices or delays? The word cloud will update in real-time to show relevant keywords.
Benefits of speech analytics
Organizations can leverage speech analytics to review key call metrics and even detect emotions in a speaker’s voice. By using this data, enterprises can more quickly analyze customer needs and optimize the performance of their call center agents.
The data you receive from this software can also be used to make informed decisions about your operations and provide insights into key stakeholders within the organization.
The fact that speech analytics software can analyze 100% of contacts 24/7 means contact centers can be more proactive and have a more accurate view of what is truly happening during customer interactions.
The major benefits of implementing speech analytics software are:
- Identifying key factors that impact operational performance
- Improved contact center performance
- Ability to deliver better customer experiences
- Reduced costs
- Ability to improve agent training
Identifying key factors that impact operational performance
By using a word cloud, you can identify frequent keywords and key phrases in your contact center’s conversations. This information tells you what type of interactions are ongoing and can be used to understand call drivers which is especially relevant when detecting emerging problems.
This enables you to find and report issues quicker, which also allows you to resolve issues quicker. You can then follow up with speech analytics to ensure that the changes made had the desired effect.
This also helps other departments and functions within the company quickly gain insights into what types of conversations are happening at the contact center and what types of changes or decisions might need to be made.
Improved contact center performance and agent training
Only relying on survey results can lead to inaccurate representation simply because only a small percentage typically answers surveys. By analyzing every single conversation, you can gain insights which might not even come up in the surveys. Agents’ assessment will be more fair and therefore more qualified when utilizing data from every single interaction rather than just a percentage.
The entire contact center can also be more confident in the quality scores when using both survey and speech assessment.
Speech sentiment
This technology is used to identify the call driver, or the products and services mentioned but can also be used to identify the customer’s mood. This is done by focusing not only on the words spoken, but also looking at characteristics such as volume and pitch.
Analyzing calls allows you to pinpoint your customer’s needs, desires, problems, and expectations. This can provide an indication of what you need to improve both regarding agent training but also with your offering or your products and services.
Reduced costs
There are several ways this type of technology can help reduce costs. Using insights from this software in agent training can result in higher frequency of first call resolution (FCR) and shortened call times.
Speech analytics can also be used to identify opportunities to sell additional products or services to the customer.
Finally, it can be used to find issues or problems quicker, which shortens the time to act and fix that specific issue.
Risk of speech analytics
Previously, this type of software has worked well for interactions and conversations held in English but has had lower quality with other languages as well as in interpreting dialects. However, thanks to the countless amount of data we now have through AI-systems, there is enough voice data to ensure high quality and accurate results for many languages and dialects. The important thing is to ensure that the software supports the language of your customers and/or target group.
Another issue has previously been the cost of buying, implementing, and running this software. The development of cloud processing has been crucial in decreasing costs which means that the technology is now both more reliable and more affordable.
