Gradually gaining attention, speech analytics solutions are proving to be one of the most useful technology solutions in contact centers to assess call recordings and transcripts from other interaction channels such as text messages and chats. Equipped with advanced technology such as AI, ML, and Natural Language Processing (NLP), contact center speech analytics offers extraordinary benefits to the business in terms of improving CX and overall performance. In this blog, we explain what it is and dive into the benefits it offers to contact centers.
What is Speech Analytics?
Customer Experience is becoming a key to success for most businesses. However, understanding what the customers want and think about the brand is daunting without the help of some technology. That is where speech analytics technology comes into the picture.
Quadrant Knowledge Solutions defines it as a solution that identifies, categorizes, analyzes, and transcribes recorded or real-time calls through automatic speech recognition and audio mining tools to discover useful information regarding the call and improve quality assurance. It utilizes artificial intelligence to automate and detect words and audio patterns to understand the emotions, stress levels, and silence of the speaker during the voice call.
Speech Analytics solution transcribes all customer interactions and organizes them into searchable data. This means rather than limiting to only a certain sample of conversations, you are now analyzing the entire pool of conversations that took place via all the channels. It enables you to identify issues that might be existing across multiple calls as a serious problem earlier ignored. Hence, rather than making decisions based on your predictions of what customers think, businesses can actually know what customers can feel and think about their brand. Moreover, it also presents a better picture of the employees and their performance based on their interactions. These insights drive wonderful results in improving customer relationships and agent performance based on solid analytics.
Business Benefits of Speech Analytics for Contact Centers:
Listed Below are some of the most important speech analytics benefits for Contact Centers.
- Increased Customer Experience
With detailed real-time insights and analytics based on a larger dataset gathered and organized by Speech analytics, the contact centers can know what the customers need and value. They can redirect their customer interactions based on this, which improves their overall experience. Improved customer experience would eventually mean more customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Reduced Customer Churn
Customer churn rate is the rate at which customers leave your brand for some other option. With improved customer experience, the business earns customer satisfaction and loyalty. They improve their customer relationships based on the insights. It reduces customer churn as they feel that the business understands them and provides what they expect.
- Improved Agent Performance
The customer service agents’ performance is vital for the success of contact centers. Supervisors can measure and assess it in great detail with the help of speech analytics. The monitoring process becomes quite simple with real-time dashboards, visualizations, and a number of matrices such as the agent’s conversation topic (subject of conversation), volume, speed, customer sentiment, information retrieval time (time taken by the agent to retrieve the info needed for the conversation) and overall call quality scores.
It gives the supervisor a lot of insights into where the agents are lacking and what can be done to improve. In fact, the insights provided by contact center speech analytics are so neatly generated that they can analyze each agent’s performance like this and pinpoint areas of improvement. The Data collected can also be used to develop training programs and other initiatives for the agents.
- Better Customer Data Collection and Analysis
Speech analytics gathers otherwise less accessible information from customer service calls and makes them usable by analyzing and generating insights about customers that would have rarely been found out through customer surveys or other methods. By integrating it with CRM software, a business can gather customer data from all possible interactions and social media channels. With such a large searchable dataset and advanced technological capabilities such as Automatic Speech Recognition, NLP, and AI, it uncovers key insights and detects trends with more sophisticated analysis. Using the information, the contact centers can improve customer experiences and employee performances along with optimizing operational issues by analyzing the impact of sales and marketing initiatives.
- Real-time and Post-call speech analytics
With real-time speech analytics, agents can get scripted answers or insights extracted from previous similar calls and can also create alerts about attention based on the customer’s tone of voice and modulations. In addition to that, these solutions also offer post-call speech analytics through call transcriptions making data searchable and actionable data. It shows interactive dashboards and reports for the contact centers to query the data for their specific problems, drill down the problems and take necessary actions to avoid those issues in the future.
- Improved Overall Performance in the business
The knowledge gained from the speech analytics solutions has the potential to help departments across the organizations with product development, optimizing operations, reducing bottlenecks, enhancing marketing campaigns, and many other purposes. One advantage is problem identification and resolution through analysis of all the customer interactions instead of just a sample of them. They can enforce initiatives to solve a particular issue and also check its effectiveness through speech analytics reports. It would make the process quite accessible and measurable. Another advantage is fairer quality assessments for the contact center agents keeping in mind the compliances, KPIs, and overall performance. Workflow automation, time-saving, overall operations efficiency, and accuracy are some of the other benefits that the contact center enjoys as a whole with the help of speech analytics.
Factors such as its implications for improving customer journey analytics, growing maturity of advanced technologies such as AI, ML, NLP, Automated Speech recognition, and cross-channel insights are driving the adoption of speech analytics solutions in the market. In fact, NLP is becoming a major driving force for the technology as it helps in capturing, recording, organizing, structuring, and analyzing spoken human languages.
According to Ganesh Reddy (Analyst at Quadrant Knowledge Solutions), ‘There is a growing demand for speech analytics solutions and services, especially in the areas of call monitoring, customer experience management, agent performance management, sentiment analysis, and risk and compliance management. As speech analytics can address all these areas users tend to engage in speech analytics over other technologies. In a rapidly digitalizing world where customer experience (CX) is a growing differentiator between organizations, CX technologies like Speech Analytics which makes use of NLP and AI are in growing demand. Enterprises that make use of Speech Analytics technologies will have an edge over the others that don’t use them, along with it the technology will also act as a new source of ROI and operational insights.’
In the future, contact center speech analytics is bound to become essential for these businesses aiming to stay ahead of the competition and improve CX. So, if you think your business needs its implementation, there is no better time than now. However, choosing the right solution from multiple software providers in the market for your specific needs could be daunting. That is why our detailed research report on Speech Analytics could be your one-stop guide in the decision-making for the businesses that need to integrate speech analytics technology in their business system, the software solution providers, developers, and vendors in the market. Our SPARK MatirxTM report provides research-backed insights into the speech analytics features, market dynamics, adoption trends, competitive landscapes, and vendor profiles along with our proprietary SPARK MatrixTM positioning technology vendors based on their technological excellence and customer impact. Connect with us to find out more.
Author: Vaishnavi Dave, Content Writer, Quadrant Knowledge Solutions.
