Speech Analytics Call Center: Your Complete Guide

Successful call centers rely on their ability to analyze customer conversations and build a customer service program that is specifically targeted towards meeting their customer requirements. One technology that helps them do that is speech analytics.

Speech analytics is being used by call centers to improve quality assurance, enhance customer service processes and garner valuable information from customer-agent conversations. 

But what exactly is speech analytics and why do you need it? We will cover these questions and more in this Complete Guide. 

What is speech analytics? 

Speech analytics technology transcribes and analyzes calls that come through a customer service center. This includes everything from live calls, call recording and even automated bots. 

Speech analytics gathers data from these conversations to learn about common customer service issues, how agents are performing, how customers respond during conversations and many other insights. 

The information that’s gathered from speech analytics technology can be used to better understand the quality of customer service a business is providing and where new opportunities lie for improvement. 

How does speech analytics work? 

Speech analytic programs use a combination of technologies to transcribe spoken word, uncover sentiment and provide data. This includes: 

• Contact center artificial intelligence
• Machine learning 
• Algorithms 

This allows the technology to review 100 percent of the conversations that an organization has. 

Currently, the most popular application for speech analytics is post call. Once a call is over, the audio file will be transcribed and analyzed. This may happen as calls come in or when a batch of calls is provided to the program. 

That being said, real-time analytics is possible and technology for this purpose is being constantly developed. 

Why is speech analytics important? 

There are many reasons that your business should be benefiting from speech analytics. 

There’s lots to be learned from a single customer service call. There’s even more information to gather when you look at patterns across every call. With the right speech analytics, you can discover insights and trends that will help you streamline and improve your customer service processes. 

When you’re getting hundreds, if not thousand calls a week, it is nearly impossible to review every call. This can make it difficult to do quality management. While you can sample calls to keep on top of it, this may stop you from becoming aware of larger trends regarding individual agents or your contact center as a whole. 

Speech analytics will help you take a more holistic approach to measuring agency and center performance. That’s because speech analytic software can review all your calls to provide insights and calculate performance scores. Using these insights, you can improve your process and provide training to improve overall performance. 

We’ve mentioned that speech analytics can help uncover trends. This includes identifying finite issues that may seem small and aren’t regularly flagged. But when you consider how many times that issue is mentioned over multiple calls, it can become something that garners more attention. 

Customers are more likely to forgive a mistake if the overall customer experience is very good. That means you can use this information to improve future calls or implement post call strategies that will help improve the overall experience for your customers. This will result in greater customer service satisfaction. 

It can be hard to know what customers are feeling. Sometimes we think we know but by the end of the call it turns out the issue was something entirely different than we initially perceived. Sometimes a call may even end without you ever knowing exactly what was wrong. 

That’s because the customer’s tone and words sometimes don’t align or the agent’s feelings or current personal situation creates a bias. Speech analytics technology is able to uncover customer sentiment more easily. This will help you get to the core of your customers' needs and desires more quickly. 

Without speech analytics, it is impossible to review every call. This is especially true when quality assurance teams have to manually review calls and gather data. Speech analytics can take out the grunt work so that your team can spend more time reviewing data. Even if you don’t analyze every call that the software transcribes and analyzes, your team will be able to review a larger sample. That means your analysis will be more robust, as opposed to it being based on a very small sample of each agent's calls. 

What type of information can speech analytics provide? 

There are lots of different data points and KPIs that speech analytics can provide. To help you understand the type of information that you can gather, here’s a small sample of information a speech analytics program may be able to provide. 

• Adherence to script which can flag agent misselling or non-compliance. 
• Excessive silence during calls which may be caused by training or system issues.
• Whether the agent and customer are speaking over each other, which may be a sign of a poor customer experience.
• Identifying common issue queries and complaints.

This information can be used to better train staff, update resources, make improvements to products and services, as well as drive positive change in agents. 

Common pitfalls when implementing speech analytics 

To ensure you get the most out of your speech analytics, you should be aware of common pitfalls that can occur: 

You still need analysts 

Many organizations will assign the wrong person to manage their speech analytics program. But for your team to be able to benefit from the data the program provides, you’ll need a logical thinker with a good understanding of statistics to analyze the reports. That way you will reap the most benefits from the data provided. 

You need your team to be excited about it 

Good software and analysts aren’t enough to make speech analytics effective. For this solution to really pay off, you need buy in from staff, management, and stakeholders. Be sure everyone understands that speech analytics is important and how they will help everyone be more successful. 

People are often afraid of change, especially when they think it will make them look bad. Show your team that speech analytics technology will help individuals develop more skills, allow you to provide agents with better support and help the business grow. 

Don’t use it to replace your entire quality assurance process 

Technology is a great tool. But even though speech analytics can assess up to 100 percent of calls and reduce monotonous and labor-intensive work, it isn’t a complete quality assurance solution. 

Speech analytics is intended to save time and free up resources. That way your team has more time to review anomalies, uncover root causes, find solutions and act on insights. 

If you want to learn more about the benefits of speech analytics software, and how it can revolutionize your customer service program, then contact Advantage Communications today.