AI Enabled Speech Analytics in Call Centers
12-Minute Read
Table of contents
Introduction
With modern technology and good execution, there’s huge potential for speech analytics in call centers. This revolutionary technology is a tremendous boon to call center agents and can greatly improve the quality of customer interactions while making quality assurance a snap. Let’s take a look at how this tech works, and how it can aid call centers, agents, and their customers.
Key takeaways
- Customer experience is enhanced by speech analytics: By providing agents with real-time insights about the customer’s mindset during an interaction, agents can flexibly adjust their approach in a way that is tailored to each customer.
- Customer loyalty benefits: Since speech analytics highlights the subtle hints and cues that customers give in each interaction, it allows agents to approach the interaction with more empathy and understanding. This allows customers to feel heard and makes them more likely to stick around.
- QA and legal compliance: Speech analytics can detect deviations from standards and even legally risky language, and can help agents to get back on track in real time.
What is speech analytics in call centers?
Speech analytics is the technology that allows call centers to analyze the content, emotion, and sentiment of a call. This is done by taking advantage of machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to carefully pore over everything that is said in a call, the tone and emotion of how it was said, and the overall sentiment of the call.
Since this tech is AI-enabled and every call is able to be analyzed in this way, that allows call centers to not only extract call-specific information from each individual call and assure quality but also to identify trends in customer behavior and preferences as time goes on. The same technology behind speech analytics in call centers also allows for the analysis of other communication channels, like chat, text, and social media.
What can speech analytics do for a call center?
Speech analytics in call centers truly has the power and potential to transform how the industry operates. Let’s take a look at just a few of the benefits that AI-enabled speech and text analytics can have for omnichannel contact centers.
Enhance customer experience
Each customer will walk away from an interaction with customer service with thoughts and feelings about the experience. Speech analytics in real-time allow you to extract valuable insights from each call, cataloging the precise wording your customers used, the tone they said it with, and the general feeling of the call. Using this real-time data, agents can use change strategy in the moment for better results. Additionally, the insights that call centers gain allow them to determine how satisfied each customer is with their experience, and make actionable plans to improve each interaction in the future.
Improve customer loyalty
In day-to-day conversation, communication can be difficult. Catching each subtle inflection, word choice, or piece of subtext often isn’t possible, and as a result, when customers send subtle messages about their satisfaction, agents might not get the hint, leaving customers feeling unheard and putting their loyalty at risk. Speech analytics catches more of that subtext, analyzing the conversation for customer dissatisfaction, and flagging mentions of competitors (which often signals that the customer is sizing up competitors as suitable replacements). By putting this information in focus for agents and team leads, speech analytics can greatly improve their customer retention efforts and listen more closely to what each customer has to say.
Monitor for quality assurance
Speech analytics can cut both ways. Each call center has certain standards of ethics and quality to uphold. When a call or customer interaction falls short of those standards, speech analytics can flag the interaction to allow agents and team leads the opportunity to address the concerns early before unhealthy patterns develop.
Sentiment analysis
Consumer behaviors and decisions are often not logical, but emotional. That’s why it’s not just important to listen to the exact words that customers use, but also to the way they say those words. The tone of voice, the cadence of their speaking, and other traits are often great indicators of how a customer is feeling. Call center voice analytics software can offer insights in real-time into how a customer is feeling about their experience, giving agents the ability to adjust their approach accordingly.
Legal compliance
Saying the wrong thing to a customer isn’t just about hurting someone’s feelings — it can also land your business in legal trouble. Overstepping legal regulations like HIPAA and other confidentiality agreements is not a thing to be taken lightly. Call center speech analytics can help reduce legally risky language and outright non-compliance with real-time detection.
Increased efficiency and revenue
In any call center, quality assurance is a must, whether a human is conducting the QA from the top down, or if it is aided by call center voice analytics software. When a human alone is tasked with the tedious task of manually combing through hundreds of hours of recorded calls, it can be a tremendous waste of time, effort, and money. That’s not to mention the fact that it isn’t feasible or cost-effective to offer real-time QA to each call, so feedback is often sporadic and offered hours or even days after the fact. With speech analytics, call centers can greatly increase efficiency by having this feedback delivered in the moment, all while boosting revenue.
Reduce operational costs
Speech analytics can allow companies to statistically identify which customer complaints and questions are most commonly called in. With that information, companies can adjust their call center strategies, focusing their time, effort, and training on specific needle-moving tasks instead of wasting resources on the wrong services.
Optimize sales outcomes
Speech analytics can keep track of which strategies have proved the most successful in the past. Knowing which tactics and behaviors lead to the best sales outcomes is crucial information and can greatly inform your sales playbook and help train your team accordingly.
Help product and service development
The feedback you receive from customers through speech analytics can double as product research, allowing you to gather information about what customers like about your products and services, and what they think needs improvement.
Analyze competitor mentions
It’s not uncommon for customers to mention competitors and (directly or indirectly) compare them to the service they are currently receiving. Contact center speech analytics can catalog these mentions and put them into context. Knowing how your customers think of you in comparison to competitors can be valuable information that allows you to address both your offering and the way that you communicate it to customers.
Stay ahead of the competition
By paying attention to the trends in your customers’ behavior and making informed decisions based on hard data from contact center speech analytics, you’ll be able to give your customers a better customer experience than any competitor not taking advantage of speech analytics.
Let’s take a look at some of the most common use cases for speech analytics technology.
Quality assurance
Instead of sporadic monitoring and belated feedback to agents, speech analytics allows call centers to monitor and provide feedback to 100% of agent calls and provide feedback and coaching in real-time. This grants call centers the ability to ensure that all agents are staying within established guidelines and staying compliant with legal requirements in every interaction, prompting agents with real-time coaching that allows them to course-correct early for the best customer outcome. It also protects against security concerns like scammers by flagging risky language.
Customer sentiment
Speech analytics are a surefire way to get a read on how a customer is feeling about the interaction, which can be instrumental for agents to determine their strategy on the call and how to adjust their approach on the fly.
Spot negative trends
Though speech analytics are very useful to agents during a call, the same data can also be advantageous on an organizational level. When aggregated, speech analytics data can reveal significant trends in customer behavior, common complaints, or even common challenges that agents are struggling with.
Manage your team
Instead of struggling to assess each and every agent on the call floor and running the risk of micro-managing their every move, you can use speech analytics to flag the precise calls that need your attention, allowing you to focus on the needle-moving tasks that help your team
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Features of a speech and text analytics service for call centers
The following are just a few of the features and benefits that speech and text analytics can bring to a call center.
Post-call and real-time speech analytics
Speech analytics are useful both in real-time as well as after the call has ended. Both post-call and real-time analytics have their applications.
Post-call analytics are mainly useful for gathering and aggregating big-picture data, allowing call centers to identify notable trends and determine which words and phrases are most indicative of positive or negative outcomes, as well as getting a pulse on the general sentiment of customers as a whole.
When used in real-time, speech analytics are very handy for improving the customer experience. This is done by providing call center agents with prompts in the moment they need them, adapting to the current conversation, and suggesting appropriate actions and strategies for the best possible customer experience.
Accurate transcription
Using natural language processing, speech analytics software is able to accurately transcribe a conversation. This not only gives you a complete record of everything said, it also makes every call indexable and easily searchable.
Advanced analytics reports for actionable insights
Post-call analytics can reveal any emerging patterns in customer behavior, as well as keep tabs on the performance of individual agents and the call center in general. With this data in hand, call centers can easily draw up reports to illuminate where improvement needs to be made.
Customizable dashboards
Though many of them are similar, every business will have its own unique key performance indicators and metrics that define its success. That’s why it’s important for any dashboard that measures those metrics to be fully customizable. By using speech analytics data in conjunction with key metrics like call durations, overall customer satisfaction, and others, call centers can determine what kinds of conversations lead to which outcomes, thereby increasing the odds of success.
Omnichannel Integrations
Call center speech analytics software can also seamlessly integrate with the rest of your team’s suite of software, making it easier to update customer profiles in your CRM, keep track of team efficiency within your workforce management software, contact management systems, and many others. This allows you to keep all of your data in one location where it can be easily managed and analyzed.
Speech analytics can work beautifully hand-in-hand with a quality contact management system. See the inner workings of contact management systems below!
Workforce quality assurance
Voice analytics for call centers provides an excellent avenue for ensuring quality performance from your agents. Real-time prompts can provide agents with up-to-the-minute coaching and the whole call can be quickly scored based on how its content meets your criteria for compliance. This can efficiently and judiciously help you keep track of high-quality performance and highlight areas where things can improve.
Automation
Speech analytics make short work of the tedious task of post-call digital paperwork. Based on the content of the call, speech analytics can instantly summarize calls, update customer profiles in CRMs, and aid future agents in providing a more personal touch to customers in later calls.
Artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities
The combined transcriptions of all the calls fielded by a single call center can create a staggering amount of data that would be an intimidating and unstructured mess for one human being to reasonably sift through. However, modern large language models (LLM), natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning can make short work of analyzing huge amounts of information, all in proper context, within a very short amount of time.
Easy for staff to use
To get the most out of any speech analytics tool, it’s important that it works seamlessly and intuitively, as this will increase the likelihood of call center agents using it to its fullest potential. A clean and simple UI and navigation scheme, as well as instructive and clear error messages, can go a long way to improving your agents’ user experience.
Implementing speech analytics in a call center
As you begin implementing call center voice analytics software into your business’s workflow, here are some key steps to remember along the way:
- Identify goals
The number one thing to consider here is to define exactly what you want out of speech analytics. What processes in your business need to improve? Are you struggling with long call times? Do you have low customer satisfaction? Once you are sure where you need to improve and what needs to happen to get you to your goals, you can make a better selection of which call center speech analytics software is best suited to your objectives. - Choose software
Once you know your specific needs, it’s time to look at the variety of software available, comparing their features to your ideal speech analytics wishlist. How does each software score in terms of scalability, accuracy, and other important metrics? Do they fit seamlessly into your existing technological infrastructure? Reputation is also worth looking into. What kind of experience do other customers have with this software? Would they recommend it? If they have similar needs to yours, were their needs met? - Set KPIs
Understanding exactly which metrics you hope to track with speech analytics is a necessity. Indicators like average call time, customer sentiment, agent performance, first-call resolution rate, and many other metrics can help to paint a picture of a contact center’s overall performance. Understanding which ones are most applicable to your business and most indicative of your success will allow you to more effectively evaluate what kind of an impact your speech analytics software is making. - Train Staff
It’s not enough to just hand your agents a new tool and expect them to know exactly how to incorporate it into their workflow. As you integrate speech analytics into your infrastructure, ensure that all agents are taught not only the “how” and “what” of the technology, but also the “why”. Impress upon each agent how speech analytics can make their workday both smoother and more effective while providing a more personalized and positive experience for each customer. - Utilize the Data Collected
As speech analytics builds you a comprehensive body of extracted data, you’re finally ready to reap the benefits of those insights. Learn more about what makes your customers tick. What are their common pain points? What questions do they ask the most? What complaints do they have about your product or service? The answers to these questions can give you all the information you need to improve your customer experience. - Adjust Methods
Finally, when the results are in, you can act on your new insights. Take the new understandings you’ve gained from speech analytics data and change your processes accordingly. This can be done by increasing efficiency, improving your training programs, developing different call scripts, or implementing any number of changes to the customer experience you provide.
What is the future of speech analytics?
As technology progresses, and our understanding of machine learning and NLP develop further, we’re looking at a future where call centers can easily utilize speech analytics to anticipate customer pain points before they fully present themselves, because agents have been given tools that determine which benign-seeming situations can develop into complaints later on, and suggest personalized preventative solutions. These technologies have great potential to aid contact center agents in providing powerful but flexible service that anticipates each customer’s needs.
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