What is speech analytics?

What is speech analytics?

Speech Analytics is the process of extracting meaning from audio recordings and analyzing that data for relevant and meaningful business intelligence. Speech analytics software takes spoken word data in multiple languages and dialects and transcribes it into text for analysis.

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Why is speech analytics important?

It’s true that more and more interactions are online, but for high value, important issues, talking to a human is often the preferred route making call recordings a major source of unsolicited customer feedback.

39% of consumers prefer to talk to someone on the phone to dispute a bill

Here are a few ways in which using speech analytics can transform your customer interactions:

Take action on customer calls

Rather than keeping valuable customer – and employee performance – information siloed in individual calls, speech analytics can uncover key insights and detect trends across every call. The right speech analytics platform can help businesses discover actions they can take to improve employee and customer experiences.

Improve contact center performance

You might have some oversight over your contact center agents, but it’s hard to manually review every recorded call for quality management purposes. Sampling calls to review can keep you and your business unaware of the larger trends across the contact center that impact performance and everyone’s experiences.

You can more easily judge your agent performance by implementing speech analytics solutions that automatically score all calls for compliance, KPIs, and performance. Automated speech recognition, or ASR, capabilities recognize the spoken words agents and customers use, transcribe those words, and the speech analytics software can then use that data to automatically score performance. Your call quality can then be improved using the insights you glean from this analysis, and your agents will have a less biased score for their call performance.

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Increase customer satisfaction

Evaluating your contact center efficacy is vital to improving customer satisfaction – not just with their original purchase, but with your issue resolution process and customer experience generally. We found that 75% of consumers are “very likely” to forgive a brand for a mistake or issue if they think it delivers a “very good” customer experience. In contrast, a very poor experience will only lead to 14% of consumers forgiving that error.

Using speech analytics, you can identify issues that might be trending across multiple calls that might not have been picked up as a serious problem otherwise. You can also then assess whether any measures you take have an effect by monitoring customer sentiment in your calls post-implementation.

Which businesses can benefit from using speech analytics?

Highly regulated industries such as financial services and healthcare can particularly benefit from speech analytics, as they have regulatory compliance requirements regarding storing and searching for customer data. They also have a pressing need for the earliest possible indication of compliance violations – and people calling with complaints or questions can definitely be a red flag.

How does speech analytics work?

Speech analytics uses a combination of sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing, machine learning, and algorithms to analyze spoken words. This speech recognition picks up on customer sentiment, attributing an emotional character to customer conversation, and identifies trends across calls.

Speech analytics tools can draw out the voice of the customer in their own words, helping you to understand customers’ needs and desires more quickly and easily. Rather than having to make decisions based on what you think customers are feeling, you can know how customers feel. By analyzing what customers are actually saying about your brand, you can make improvements to your customer relationships and agent performance with a foundation built on solid analytics.

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Speech analytics software: what to look out for

Your speech analytics software needs to be able to quickly detect complex concepts from large amounts of data. There are key features to look out for when selecting your speech analysis software to ensure you’re getting the most out of your speech analytics.

Contact center evaluation as standard

Your speech analytics tool should enable supervisors to analyze and monitor individual agents’ performance using all of their call data. Comprehensive data analysis of every individual agents’ calls, rather than random samples, can improve accuracy, minimize bias, and ensure compliance at the same time.

Speech analytics is one piece of the analytics puzzle

A highly refined analytics tool will be able to perform speech analysis as well as text analysis. Having one tool that can analyze not only phone calls, but chat logs, social media mentions, review posts, and more means you can get the full picture of your brand image and customer experience.

Turning sophisticated data into better experiences

The backbone of every great company strategy is creating customer experiences that meet and even exceed customer expectations. With a tool that can empower you to understand the customer experience, and what your customers are saying in phone calls, you can improve the interactions and experiences your customers have with your brand.

It’s not enough for your tool to tell you what is happening in your data. You need to get valuable intelligence from your speech analysis that will help you improve operational efficiency, reduce customer churn, and reduce repeat contact on the same business issues.

Gain a competitive advantage with speech analytics

The speech analytics market is predicted to be worth $4.5 billion by 2026, demonstrating a huge demand for such capabilities in the coming years. Don’t get left behind – you can start using speech analytics quickly and easily with Qualtrics, now powered by Clarabridge.