Digital Themes

Speech Analytics

What is Speech Analytics?

Speech Analytics, also called customer engagement analytics, the voice of the customer analytics, and interaction analytics, are systems that can analyze text, phone, social, email, and webchat conversations. Since the early 2000s, the speed and accuracy of these systems have grown exponentially. Companies use these analytics systems to course-correct agent performance, improve efficiency, maintain compliance, enhance the customer experience, and increase overall revenue.

Speech analytics software transcribes any conversation and organizes it into searchable, structured data that can be used to gain a better understanding of how customers think and feel. Speech analytics is a tool often used to see what is truly happening throughout the customer experience and create actionable insights to correct problems and improve customer relationships.

Speech analytics collects the unstructured data found in recorded calls, chat transcripts, customer emails, and any other customer interactions and pairs it to structured metadata (e.g. time of day, length of the call, or which agent handled the interaction). Any audio is put through a speech recognition process that can turn the speech to text. Concurrently, audible signals are extracted (e.g. volume, tempo, agitation in the voice, or silence).

Satisfied customers are the basis for growth and success in any business, so hearing and addressing customer feedback, needs, concerns, and ideas enables a better understanding of what makes a customer's experience exceptional, and ultimately drives business growth.

Speech analytics can propel customer satisfaction by providing real-time, easily visible, post-interaction metrics able to quantify and interpret previously subjective behaviors, creating immediate, accurate, and objective awareness into agent behavior.

Performance can be monitored remotely by other agents, various team leaders, managers, and even executives, empowering every member of the team to focus on the same business goals and objectives, regardless of location. Businesses can cultivate connections with customers and employees that drive quality assurance in-house or in a remote work landscape.

What are the business benefits of Speech Analytics?

  • Improved Agent Performance and Goal Realization - Using speech analytics tools, agents can identify existing customers who may be open to buying additional products or services, the most in-demand products in the market, and the most compelling techniques to close a deal. Data collected can also be used to develop training programs on innovative ways to reduce missed opportunities.

  • Mitigated Risk and Compliance - Monitoring trends and seeing how training and other initiatives are affecting your agents and customers is a good way to create a baseline. However, certain financial or legal implications require instant notification. Speech analytics solutions can include custom notifications, using keywords to generate notifications to the appropriate department.

  • Reduced Customer Churn - Improved customer experiences based on speech analytics and customer insights can reduce the churn rate (i.e. the rate at which customers break ties with a business) by providing exceptional service and growing relationships with customers and prospects.

  • Reduced Agent Churn - Employee churn rates (i.e. the rate at which employees quit their jobs) for jobs involving customer service remain extremely high. Reducing this saves companies valuable time and resources needed to train new employees. Real-time speech analytics reduces the rate of churn by letting employees know instantly (instead of waiting for a quarterly or yearly review) which areas of their customer calls they need to improve, and where they excel.

  • Improvement Across the Enterprise - Sharing the knowledge and insights gained from speech analytics can help departments across the enterprise, including providing insight for product development, sharpening the focus of marketing messages, and optimizing operations to reduce bottlenecks.
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