Speech Analytics Solution-What is speech analytics?

October 27, 2023

Speech Analytics Solution-What is speech analytics?

Measuring and managing the customer’s experience is important to every business. Your contact center data can offer a deeper insight into customer experience and business outcomes, but only if managed properly. Most companies barely track 5% of discussions, which results in siloed and unavailable data. 

Imagine being able to track 100% of customer interactions in your contact center and leveraging voice data to understand the customer’s genuine voice. You have probably heard a lot about speech analytics tools and how they can help improve businesses. But one thing needs to be cleared; the accuracy of these speech analytics solutions.

What Is Speech Analytics?

Sales are no longer just restricted to brick-and-mortar establishments or door-to-door marketing. Like everything else, sales have also moved from the restrictions of face-to-face meetings to the online environment. This is particularly true for B2B sellers who make thousands of calls monthly to connect with their clients. B2Bs and large enterprises can use speech analytics to enhance the customer experience.

Speech analytics involves using a voice recognition tool to listen to, assess and document a spoken discussion, usually over the phone. These tools are known to translate speech and analyze audio patterns to understand the speaker’s mood and the call’s purpose.

What Speech Analytics Companies Will Tell You

No doubt using speech analytics to track customer interaction improves business performance. However, most, if not all, providers will only inform you of the positives, leaving out the most important points. With the right information, you will know how to discern what’s best for your business.

Speech Analytics Is Accurate

Often, agents selling speech analytics try to win customers by overstating what the tools can do. It brings out speech analytics as perfect and accurate, but they use this as a selling point. A genuine provider will tell you the shortcomings of speech analytics. 

The highest accuracy rates possible for any speech analytics technology are up to 90%. If anybody tells you otherwise, don’t believe them. Many factors contribute to this inefficiency, but the most significant is the initial sample set of calls you offer during the onboarding process. Every speech analytics software needs this for use as a benchmark to determine results. 

The software will not always give the most accurate results if your sample calls are not of the best quality and diverse. Think of it as a statistical sampling process where only a fragment of a certain population is tested. While the results might represent the whole population, they might not apply to everyone. 

Therefore, unless you are sure you have provided all the calls you had in the past, which is impracticable, there is no way of ascertaining accuracy. Furthermore, customers are different and might come to you with different problems. 

Speech Analytics Can Replace Humans

One thing for sure is speech analytics solution tools have better speed than humans, but they can’t be used as a replacement. Machines are known for their unmatched intelligence and swiftness, one that humans cannot top. However, you’re mistaken if you think they can replace your staff at the contact center. Humans may not be as swift as machines, but they are smarter. 

Because of this dexterity, human intelligence still plays a major role in contact centers. Tools like speech analytics can only do so much. They operate within set rules, and if the codes that run them don’t allow certain things, they cannot go out of their way. Humans can often think out of the box to come up with solutions to problems their customers are facing. 

What You Need to Know about Speech Analytics

A speech analytics tool helps in extracting information from spoken language. One of its main roles is translating speech and analyzing the speaker’s mood. The main concern, in this case, is whether the tools can perform these roles efficiently. 

Humans express themselves in different ways, including satire and sarcasm. A study was conducted to determine whether speech analytics solution tools detect such expressions. From the results, no tool in the market currently is intelligent enough to discern human emotion, which is often expressed differently. 

This means when the speech analytics software solution analyzes spoken language, it only tells the customer’s mood through the words used. For instance, if the phrase has words like good, excellent, or well done, the speech analytics will automatically gauge it as a positive emotion. But these words can be used sarcastically to mean something different.

Let’s have a practical example. Assuming you were having a bad day and, to make it even worse, one of your kitchen appliances stopped working, necessitating you to contact customer service for guidance. During your call, the contact center representative informed you that your appliance could not be salvaged, and since your warranty has already expired, they cannot help with the issue. To express disappointment, you use a sarcastic phrase. “Wonderful! That’s just what I needed today!” 

The contact center agent will realize the sarcasm in the statement and try to make you feel better. However, speech analytics solution will assume that the customer was happy because they got what they needed. This is why you can never fully depend on speech analytics reports to make business decisions. You need human verification to ensure every emotion expressed is captured.

Contact Center Use Cases for Speech Analytics

Statistics show that close to 40% of people prefer to speak to someone on the phone about a dispute. Many of these interactions can make the difference between losing a loyal customer and tarnishing your brand reputation, or creating improved customer satisfaction and lowered churn. 

Speech analytics provides a mechanism for actively listening to these interactions, with the aim to improve customer satisfaction and enhance operational efficiency. Let’s look into how you can use speech analytics for your contact center.

Increased Customer Satisfaction

Happy customer, happy business. This is a common phrase that emphasizes the importance of customer satisfaction. There are so many hidden signals from customer sentiments that your business can benefit from.

Contact center speech analytics and generative artificial intelligence (AI) software provide near real-time guidance to help understand their sentiment about your product or service. However, speech analytics and AI are not always accurate and may give the wrong results. This is why it is important to have your speech analytics and AI backed by human review and correction processes to continuously improve accuracy. With AI interaction evaluations and speech analytics tools, you can significantly increase the number of calls evaluated and provide feedback to agents and supervisors to reduce customer churn.

Improved Contact Center performance

Your contact center’s performance has a direct impact on your business. Monitoring your agent calls and assessing their performance against scorecards gives you an insight into how things are running. 

However, monitoring a contact center’s performance can be a daunting process if you don’t have the right resources. The best way to keep track of activities in your contact center is by automating quality assurance for accuracy. Through this, you can monitor key KPIs and boost quality assurance, which in turn boosts customer experience.

Regulatory compliance and risk management

Contact centers must adhere to regulatory rules lest they face dire consequences. For instance, agents are required to inform customers that their calls are recorded for quality purposes right at the beginning of the conversation. 

When agents forget this or fail to obtain consent for other items, they violate the customer’s rights and might subject the company to legal repercussions. Speech analytics can flag such instances and allow you to mitigate the risk. 

Improved operational efficiency

Speech analytics and AI based evaluation criteria help in analyzing customer interactions. Through this, contact centers can identify recurring themes, pain points, and emerging trends. The information is then used to fine-tune the service or sales processes and enhance the overall customer experience.

Additionally, through the analysis of customer conversations, contact centers identify opportunities for suggesting complementary products or services. Agents can be equipped with real-time prompts and guidance based on customer needs and preferences, ensuring that every interaction with an opportunity for revenue growth is capitalized on. 

Personalized agent coaching

By analyzing recorded customer interactions, speech analytics can identify specific areas where individual agents excel and where they may need improvement. This detailed insight enables managers to create customized coaching sessions that cater to the specific strengths and weaknesses of each agent, thereby fostering their ongoing professional growth.

Sentiment Analysis

You can judge how a customer feels about your services through their emotions. This is often expressed through words that the speech analytics software will capture in its report. However, AI may categorize some of the sentiments wrongly, leading to misjudgment. Some emotional responses can only be acknowledged by the human ear, which is why you should it is best to back AI with human review. 

Call Criteria Speech Analytics Solution for the Best Contact Center Quality Assurance

We understand how crucial it is to get everything right at your contact centers, which is why we conduct our quality assurance differently. One of the core values we operate on is precision, and we achieve this by combining Artificial Intelligence with Human Intelligence. Our quality assurance is driven by Artificial Intelligence but verified by humans to ensure nothing slips through the cracks.

Unlike other providers, we know speech analytics solutions cannot be 100% perfect, and we don’t hide that hard truth from our clients. The speed of AI and the precision of the human ear work together flawlessly to deliver 99.5% efficiency at a price lower than any of our competitors. If you’re ready to take your contact center quality assurance to the next level, contact us today to learn more about how our Speech Analytics Solution can help your business achieve the efficiency and precision it needs to succeed.