What is driving the marketplace today? According to Gartner, CX drives over two-thirds of customer loyalty, which represents more than brand and price combined. 86% of consumers say they will leave a brand after as few as two poor experiences, while 65% of consumers find a positive experience with a brand to be more influential than great advertising. Customer experience monitoring is no longer a luxury; it’s vital to your business’s very survival.

While providing superlative service is the ultimate goal of every business, it is important to strike a balance between operational efficiency and profitability as well. Speech analytics is an integral component that helps you truly understand your customer so that you can remain highly profitable and in sync with their needs. 

Speech analytics is a software technology that transcribes and extracts profound insights, trends, and metrics from every voice call with AI services that encompass transcription, speech technologies, and natural language processing. By comprehending, analyzing, and extracting insights from voice conversations, you can assess agent performance, the customer’s experience, and enterprise-wide strengths and weaknesses.

Why Speech Analytics?

According to McKinsey, in 2019, only 37% of contact centers believe they are creating value with advanced analytics. With contact centers receiving and making thousands of phone calls each day, ranging from sales and billing inquiries to reviews and complaints from customers, manually listening to and scoring every call received can be arduous. As a result, on an average, only about 5% of calls are scored, causing a lot of information to slip through the cracks.

Here is where speech analytics comes into play. When a phone conversation concludes, a speech recognition platform converts the conversation into text for near-immediate analysis. Speech analytics reveals precisely how sentences are uttered and thus reveals their underlying meanings, enabling you to evaluate the types of calls you receive, how your agents handle them, and how the customer felt throughout each conversation.

Often, the data is not synthesized into meaningful information for various reasons, including unclean or incomplete data, spread of data across multiple platforms, and a lack of understanding of which metrics are the most important. Combining advanced analytics such as speech and text will provide a clearer picture of the decisions that can improve your contact center’s performance.

Maximizing Conversations with Speech Analytics

Speech and text analytics allow businesses to comprehend the entire customer journey by discovering information they may not yet possess. It can identify trends and patterns that lead to vital business insights by analyzing millions of transactions across all channels, including traditional phone call recordings, call transcriptions, and even emails and text messages.

Here are a few tangible benefits of incorporating speech analytics into your contact center.

Surface actionable data

Speech and sentiment analysis give you a deeper understanding of your customers’ pain points and help you identify business or product areas that require further research or improvement. You can quickly identify changing customer trends and adapt proactively to meet customers’ desires and needs.

Boost agent retention

Feedback is a crucial component for an agent to succeed. However, contact center managers cannot monitor and analyze every call. Speech analytics empowers you to extract the sentiment of both the customer and the agent under broad themes. For instance, an agent who is scored as demonstrating a “lack of knowledge” or “lack of compliance” will need to be mentored. Agents who demonstrate concepts of courtesy and ownership effectively can be recognized and compensated for their exemplary performance, leading to a boost in morale.  

Enhance the client experience

By combining speech and text analysis, it is possible to derive meaning from interactions across all channels and transform data into structured, usable, and even graphical information that is clearly understood by the entire organization. Understanding the hiccups within your multi-channel ecosystem, how customers perceive your organization, and where representatives miss the mark are all useful tools for making better, more data-driven decisions.

Real-World Benefits and Use Cases

McKinsey reported in 2019 that contact centers that utilized advanced analytics such as speech and text were able to decrease average response time by up to 40%, increase self-service containment rates by 5 to 20%, reduce employee costs by up to $5 million, and increase service-to-sales call conversion rates by nearly 50%— all while meeting customer expectations and engaging employees. 

While deployment also includes streamlining your data and internal processes, when implemented right, you can use this information to drive improved results without the need for highly specialised data professionals. Speech to text analytics can:

• Utilize key phrases and sentiment analysis to improve overall call scoring
• Set automatic triggers to identify problems by tracking excessive transfers and lengthy hold times.
• Create an automation playbook to identify hot topics and their associated sentiments

How Valiance Uses Speech to Text Analytics

Valiance is a global AI & data analytics consulting firm helping clients of different sizes create decisioning software products using AI & Cloud Computing technologies. We use Amazon Transcribe, an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tool, to generate transcripts out of audio/video files.

We help customers monitor the conversation between the customer care executive and the customer through a speech to text algorithm, which checks if the right keywords are being used and flags inappropriate words. When this algorithm is run, the agents are scored and conversation insights such as call sentiment are extracted. These insights form the basis for training the agents further. It can also lead to product revisions and policy changes. Without this information, the real feedback from the customer may never reach management. 

We help customers:

• Combine data into a centralized location for a comprehensive, cross-channel approach
• Define which workflows and metrics will set agents up for success
• Use their results to identify training and coaching opportunities and other areas of improvement

Wrapping Up

It’s time to gain a competitive advantage by leveraging the wealth of information at your fingertips and transforming it into actionable insights. Speech and text analytics enable you to get the most out of every conversation by delving beneath the surface of what customers are saying and getting to the core of their questions in real time. Moreover, AI-driven analytics provides predictive insights thanks to the continually learning, automated technology, so you can proactively address any gaps in your customers’ needs or your agents’ actions.