Speech Analytics 101: And why it's 'A Pressing Need' for Every Contact Center

AI Speech Analytics solutions are rapidly becoming a quintessential part of every contact center. If you have any intentions of keeping up with or overtaking your competition in the areas of:

• Customer Experience (CX)
• Compliance
• Operational Efficiency
• Fine-tuning your agents' performance

…you're going to want to understand what a fully integrated speech analytics contact center is, and why it's a pressing need.

At its core, your contact center is an avenue to converse with customers; to offer your products and services, and/or improve their experience with the one you've provided. Becoming better at what you do highlights the fact that there's always room for improvement. Figuring out and gathering the appropriate knowledge, data or intelligence is a science the right speech analytics software will provide for you — in actionable form.

1. What is Speech Analytics?

Speech analytics is the process of analyzing and extracting data, in different forms, from a voice recording. With an AI-based speech analytics tool, you can augment your contact center to benefit from real-time speech analytics, as well as post-call, chat, email and social media mentions.

Traditionally, you would fill this role with a Quality Assurance Analyst (QAA) to not only analyze what was said during a call but also:

• Notice emerging trends in customer interactions
• Train and coach agents
• Improve contact center efficiency — amongst other things

As the dawn of AI floods the horizon of the tech sector, it brings with it autonomy, accuracy, and more efficient ways of carrying our workload at greater capacity than we previously had. Running a speech-analytics-driven contact center is more pivotal and prudent than ever in fulfilling your business' objectives.

Only 1–3% of calls are reviewed by analysts. In some larger organizations, analysts don't even get to review 1%. These QA teams then go on to make decisions without seeing the whole picture — almost like taking a test on a book you've only read 3% of. Do you think you'd get the best results?

2. How Does Speech Analytics Work?

Speech analytics software is brought to life by combining several technologies — natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and algorithms built around your existing quality assessment evaluation process.

There are currently three major ways a speech analytics tool provides feedback on each call:

• Speech-to-text — used in post-call analysis, transcribing all recorded words to text
• Direct phrase recognition — used for real-time analysis, scanning the conversation for pre-defined phrases
• Phonetic / NLP — detecting emotion and sentiment of both the customer and the agent

A combination of one or all of these methods results in actionable data, designed to improve your proficiency metrics.

3. How to Use Speech Analytics

There are several ways to take advantage of speech analytics once it's up and running in your contact center. Your QA team will work with your speech analytics provider to build a matrix — an advanced scorecard tied to your organization's key performance indicators (KPIs) — with which to rate and aid every call.

Within this matrix are cues that keep agents on a scripted path. Some agents struggle with the knowledge base and fall into periods of silence while they recollect or seek help. Silence is costly — it drives up average handling time (AHT).

Speech analytics helps define a more uniform experience across your contact center and increases the likelihood of reaching first-call resolution (FCR) regularly. Anytime a customer calls with a complaint or inquiry not solved the first time, it doubles your contact center's work.

Compliance is a big deal in this day and age. Your contact center may be in Europe, where staying in line with GDPR is a must. Even outside Europe, having customers that reside there means operating under those rules. If you're in banking or healthcare, you have long lists of do's and don'ts while interacting with customers. Once AI speech analytics is integrated, it becomes the all-seeing ear — keeping your agents on compliant tracks.

The feedback loop for your agents becomes instant. Rather than waiting a week or two for surveys to travel through the pipeline, speech analytics relays feedback in real time. Having been programmed with the relevant phrase library and your KPIs, the AI tells agents in real time where there's room for improvement — one of the key benefits, as it greatly nurtures a better CX and reduces customer churn.