What are Speech Analytics?

Speech analytics, also called interaction analytics, is technology that leverages artificial intelligence to understand, process, and analyze human speech. Contact centers use speech analytics to assess call recordings and transcripts from digital channels such as chat and text messages. 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 happens during customer interactions.

Speech analytics enables the examination of customer interactions to extract meaningful insights and customer sentiment by converting spoken words into structured data points. Leveraging natural language processing (NLP), automatic speech recognition (ASR), machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI), it extracts customer preferences, behavior, and emotions from customer conversations.

The power of speech analytics applications

Contact centers metamorphose into potent information hubs when speech analytics is brought into the mix. The applications of speech analytics are vast and varied, with game-changing effects:

1. Enhancing customer experience: Speech analytics software extracts customer emotions and sentiments from voice calls. Businesses can tailor their services for an enhanced customer experience by understanding customer needs and preferences. Real-time speech analysis can provide agents with on-the-spot guidance and suggestions to better serve customers during calls.
2. Improving operational efficiency: The ability to sift through thousands of recorded calls to identify trends and patterns helps businesses streamline their operations. Speech analytics tools analyze the conversation and customer data and suggest areas where contact center agents can be more efficient or need additional training. Moreover, by automating the process of sifting through calls, the speech analytics solution frees up valuable human resources for more critical tasks.
3. Monitoring quality assurance: Ensuring customer interactions align with the company's quality standards is paramount. Speech analytics can be programmed to flag calls that deviate from these standards, allowing for timely intervention and coaching. This contributes to consistency in contact center performance and safeguards the brand image.
4. Reducing customer churn: Understanding why customers leave is as important as knowing why they stay. Speech analytics identifies at-risk customers by analyzing dissatisfaction or mentions of competitor brands. Discovering these customer insights allows businesses to proactively engage these customers with retention strategies.
5. Sentiment analysis: By analyzing tone, speech patterns, and keywords, speech analytics can gauge customer emotions during calls. This is invaluable for understanding the customer's mind and can influence how agents handle the call. For example, an angry customer may require a more empathetic approach.
6. Compliance and risk management: Speech analytics can ensure that calls comply with legal regulations. Businesses can mitigate potential legal issues by automatically detecting non-compliance or risky language.
7. Cost reduction: By identifying common customer issues and queries, businesses can develop strategies or self-service options to handle them more efficiently. This reduces the workload on contact centers, resulting in cost savings.
8. Sales optimization: Speech analytics can identify successful sales tactics and behaviors from previous calls, which can be used to train agents. This leads to more effective sales calls.
9. Product and service development: Listening to customer feedback through speech analytics can offer insights into what customers like or dislike about products or services. These insights can be used for product development and service improvement.
10. Competitive intelligence: Analyzing mentions of competitors and what context they are brought up in can provide businesses with valuable intelligence on how they are positioned against competitors in the minds of customers.

Speech analytics applications are a linchpin in modern contact centers, empowering them with valuable insights for better decision-making and action planning. From boosting customer satisfaction to enhancing operational efficiency, speech analytics is integral to a business's success.

Contact center use cases for speech analytics

The unique capabilities of speech analytics applications make them ideally suited for many important functions. The following are some common contact center use cases.

• Problem identification and management: Speech analytics can identify and report on keywords and phrases used during customer interactions. This can provide insight into call drivers, including emerging problems. When contact center leaders receive timely notification of new issues, they can implement corrective measures and then use speech analytics reports to assess the effectiveness of their solutions.
• Quality management: Typical quality management practices that rely on sampling a small percentage of interactions may not provide a completely representative view of quality. Because speech analytics can analyze all interactions, contact centers can be more confident in their quality scores and individual agents receive fairer quality assessments.
• Voice of the customer: Speech analytics can identify customer sentiment, which provides organizations with a more comprehensive voice of the customer. By zeroing in on keywords and factoring in speech characteristics like volume and pitch, speech analytics can determine if customers are frustrated, happy, angry, etc. This allows contact centers to understand overall sentiment and carry out targeted interventions with at-risk customers.