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While we have entered the age of automation and digitization, many clients prefer communicating with a human agent over alternative methods of contacting businesses. The phone channel is the most prosperous media, as clients share their problems (products, services, journeys, etc.).
Call centers that use a Speech Analytics system may detect these friction areas and take steps to improve their goods and services, customer journeys, and agents’ handling of consumer demands. In this article, we will try to outline everything there is to know about speech analytics.
What is call center speech analytics?
Speech Analytics is a process of evaluating a customer’s voice. This includes collecting multiple retrievable, recognizable, and reusable data points on interactions between this consumer and a corporation.
Companies have always employed speech analytics in customer interactions to expand their understanding of the Voice of the Customer. This metric has become crucial for customer relationship management, particularly in contact centers.
Speech Analytics may be taken a step further by combining it with Quality Monitoring.
For example: analyzing the agent’s speech in addition to the customer’s, confirming the quality control and compliance control of the interaction between the client and the contact center employee.
Speech analytics gives call centers vital information enabling them to:
- Perceive emotions via targeted listening
- Divide calls by subject and kind of behavior
- Examine the unsaid language in consumer-contact center agent dialogues, such as silences, interruptions, and the allocation of speaking time
- Create graphs and reports to track interactions and changes
Integrating a speech analytics system in your call center will allow you to:
- Increase your First Call Resolution FCR ;
- Optimize the average time of calls;
- Improve the quality of calls;
- Reduce the number of conflicts with your customers;
- Analyze the signals sent by your customers (laughter, nervousness, anxiety…);
- Generate statistics to see your evolution.
According to a report by Mordor Intelligence, the speech analytics market was valued at 1649.34 million Dollars in 2020 and is predicted to increase at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 22.14% to 5460.66 million dollars by 2026.
How does speech analytics work?
Speech analytics employs several artificial intelligence (AI)-related technologies, including:
- Natural language processing
- Machine learning
- Speech recognition
- Sentiment analysis
Speech analytics helps you assess your phone calls’ effectiveness with consumers. It allows you to answer these important questions:
- Did you live up to their expectations?
- Did you respond to their inquiries?
- When they hang up with you, how are they feeling?
It also ensures that each call adheres to your communication plan to meet your clients’ expectations better. Speech analytics will help you better understand your customers’ queries and requirements by studying the causes for repeated calls and their primary pain points. This will assist you in enhancing your First Call Resolution.
Speech analytics also investigates fluctuations in your customer’s speech, frequently triggered by strong emotions (good or negative), depending on the words they use and the conversation time.
In the event of a rapid shift in the tone of voice, which might suggest uneasiness in your clients, an alert will flash on your screen: you will then be able to track the evolution of your customer’s mood based on the responses you provide!
This tool is used to understand not only your consumers but also the mood of your agents. Are they comfortable? Do they have troubles or difficulty reacting to specific concerns? Knowing all of this will help you organize your campaigns more efficiently.
“AI is only as good as the training it receives from a human.” Therefore, we asked him where the contact center tech stands now in terms of AI. Learn more about customer service, self-service, and the intersection of artificial intelligence. Bob Furniss, Senior Director, Global Salesforce at Slalom
What are the benefits of speech analytics for call centers?
Leaders in the contact center industry are challenged to reduce the cost of doing business while enhancing agent performance.
Nonetheless, the volume of contacts – particularly calls – is rising, and call center agents must deal with expanding communication channels (social networks, webchat, SMS, e-mailing, etc.).
Speech analysis aids contact centers in navigating this CX revolution, taking the pressure off the agent’s shoulders and allowing them to improve their voice interactions systematically and sustainably.
What role may speech analytics play in reconciling these two realities? Let’s have a look!
1. Automating specific calls
It is reasonable to question if an agent’s assistance is essential for particular calls. You may use a Speech Analytics system to discover, quantify, and analyze low-value calls (such as short calls). Once these have been found, more accessible customer journeys can be proposed.
You may avoid these calls by:
- Automating their management (through chatbots or call bots),
- Improving or implementing self-care (with self-service solutions such as FAQs),
- Improving client information through the proactive use of communication devices (SMS, emailing, etc.),
- Better communication to honestly reassure the consumer!
Finally, Agents are free to focus on value-added jobs, such as more difficult inquiries, where the consumer needs confidence, or where a person can position a sale more quickly.
This is why from a contact center’s perspective having a speech analysis system at the core of a customer journey strategy will most definitely improve the way you filter, prioritize, and service client interactions.
2. Eliminating the source of dissatisfaction
To do so, it is vital to seek the core causes of unhappiness and assess whether or not your call center was able to correct them, eliminating many contacts from the get-go.
A solid Speech Analytics system will frequently uncover problems in the customer journey, such as communication of a processing or resolution timeline that the organization cannot fulfill, Billing mistakes, Missed appointments, etc.
This capacity to assess client journeys holistically via the lens of customer experience is also a chance for your call center to position itself as a partner to brands and companies rather than a cost center.
Because client satisfaction is the ultimate marker for a contact center’s success, a speech analysis system is probably the only tool to tackle and improve this delicate and qualitative metric.
3. Improving First Call Resolution
A good Speech Analytics system also enables you to monitor the customer’s perceived reiteration across all channels – not just the telephone channel – to identify the most connected customer demands and explore the reasons for those requests.
After these measures, analysis can be carried out to address concerns such as:
- Inconsistency in client responses based on the media or even consultants,
- Deficiencies in the tools/processes used to qualify and process client requests or in how they are carried out by agents (a misinterpreted request results in a callback),
- Broken promises ( for example: to call back a customer, to do a specific action on the next invoice, etc.).
The speech analytics deployment is vital for a contact center because it improves the FCR, which is immediately reflected in the Net Promoter Score (NPS) or customer happiness.
4. Enhancing call processing
Finally, a comprehensive Speech Analytics tool allows you to evaluate calls using a variety of indicators. This provides more efficient call handling while also lowering Key Performances Indicators such as:
- ACD (average call duration),
- Hold and silence times
- The number of transferred calls – since not all transfers are valid or result from abnormalities.
Contact centers have always been trying to evaluate and label calls accurately. One of the significant advantages of speech analytics is that call evaluation and processing can now be made from a qualitative perspective.
5. Turning data into action for your customer strategy
Creating customer experiences that match or surpass consumer expectations and aspirations is the cornerstone of every successful business strategy. You may increase customer interactions and interactions by using speech analytics, which provides a thorough insight into the quality of the customer experience, including evaluating contact center call data.
Your tool should not only inform you of what is happening and make a comment based on speech analytics. It should provide helpful information to improve operational efficiency, such as lowering churn and eliminating numerous contacts regarding the same caller issue.
This can yield not just real-time results but also help a contact center shape its long-term data-driven call handling strategy.
6. Sentiment analysis using voice
Sentiment analysis may be performed on your target users through speech analytics tools. As a result, learning how clients feel about your products or services becomes easy. This allows you to rapidly identify and focus on the most valuable prospects more likely to convert.
Sentiment analysis is so robust that, if done right, it can take the pressure from your agents while creating much more pleasant and effective client interactions.
7. Customer Retention
Speech analytics software is more than just a transcript generator. The system serves as a platform for better use of customer engagement time to address the inquiry, discover methods to improve the Customer Experience and monetize any sales possibilities. Most customers feel that the quality of customer service determines their brand loyalty. A dependable speech analytics technology can assist you in providing the anticipated level of customer support.
The advantages of voice analytics are apparent, but are they applicable to all contact centers? With decades of consulting expertise, Fred Stacey, Co-Founder & GM of Cloud Call Center Search, believes it is helpful to enterprises only when adequately integrated and driven to the agent level.
The future of call center speech analytics
The field of “Emotion & Speech Analytics” now allows Speech Analytics to incorporate an extra dimension: human emotion. The “emotional” aspect gives customer relations managers a complete insight of call patterns or consumer irritants compared to a traditional textual transcription method paired with a keyword search.
While Speech Analytics looks at the words you say, Emotion & Speech Analytics technologies analyze nonverbal content beyond speech: how customers and agents interact, including physical symptoms that indicate emotions such as intense anger or delight, to link them to topics and call patterns to prioritize actions for improving business processes, products, and services, or agent arguments and speeches.
Our clients put a lot of thought and effort into their contact center infrastructure, the customer experience they provide, and how they keep their agents happy and engaged. That’s what makes them a good fit for NobelBiz.
Our craft is not only providing complete contact center infrastructure services but bringing peace of mind to our clients. We believe our single most important job is keeping our contact center client’s operations up and running at any cost, with little to no downtime.
NobelBiz Omni+ is a Cloud Contact Center Solution that integrates all communication channels (phone, social media, webchat, and SMS) into a unified platform. This ensures that your consumers enjoy a seamless and memorable experience.
On the other hand, our telecommunication services, NobelBiz Voice Carrier, can meet the needs of any call center, regardless of size, industry, or activity (Inbound, Outbound, or Mixed). Our expert customer service representatives are accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That is why we are known as the industry’s promise keepers.
Abdelmounim Benharouga has always had a strong passion for writing and digital marketing. He started as a Digital Content Writer part of marketing department then moved to being Customer Success Manager for the African Region within the Nobelbiz team.
