Speech Analytics in Call Centers: Unlocking the Potential of Voice Data

Though digital customer support channels and AI-powered self-service tools are becoming increasingly popular among consumers, voice communications remain vital. Research finds that over 50% of consumers prefer a phone call over messaging to reach out to brands for urgent issues, while 43% prefer speaking with a live agent over the phone when trying to resolve a shopping issue. Yet, many businesses struggle to effectively leverage the data from voice conversations and make it work to their benefit.

This is where speech analytics comes in. It can automatically transform large amounts of raw voice data into valuable insights that can further be used to enhance customer experience and improve your business outcomes. Here’s everything you need to know about call center speech analytics solutions, their benefits, and why you should use them to unlock the full potential of voice data at your organization.

What is Contact Center Speech Analytics?

Speech analytics is a technology used in contact centers to process, transcribe (speech-to-text), and analyze voice interactions between customers and agents through speech recognition, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning algorithms. It can analyze either live agent-customer calls (real-time speech analytics) or voice recordings (post-call speech analytics).

The goal of speech analytics is to capture actionable insights from human speech and use that structured data to enhance the customer experience, boost agent performance, and improve the overall quality of customer interactions. Call center speech analytics software can identify keywords and phrases and even automatically determine the emotional tone, attitude, and the amount of stress or frustration in a speaker’s voice through sentiment analysis.

What are the Benefits of Speech Analytics Call Center Software?

According to McKinsey, using speech analytics solutions can drive cost savings between 20-30%, customer satisfaction score improvements of over 10%, as well as increased sales. At the same time, organizations that fail to leverage the power of voice data risk lagging behind their competitors as speech analytics capabilities are becoming fundamental for contact centers and call centers. Check out some of the specific benefits your business can reap from adopting contact center speech analytics tools:

Improve quality assurance management

Using speech analytics for call center quality assurance management is one of its primary use cases. The software is able to aggregate valuable insights from thousands of calls and identify trends, bottlenecks, and improvement areas that would otherwise go unnoticed if monitored manually. These insights allow call centers to fine-tune their operations and ensure high customer service standards are maintained.

Prevent non-compliance issues

One of the most significant benefits of speech analytics software tools is their ability to monitor 100% of inbound or outbound calls in real time and flag any instances of compliance violation, such as when sensitive information is shared or particular risk keywords are mentioned in the conversation. That helps call centers and contact centers reduce the risks and penalties associated with non-compliance, and thus save on compliance costs.

Enhance agent coaching and training

Speech analytics call center software can greatly help contact center managers and supervisors with agent coaching and training. It can analyze different aspects of agent performance, including language usage, tone, and compliance with company policies and scripts, and identify specific areas where agents need additional coaching. The software can also monitor an agent’s progress over time, enabling managers to have a holistic view of how agents are improving.

Improve customer experience

Using sentiment analysis, which is often part of advanced speech analytics contact center solutions, the software can identify a customer’s emotions and sentiments (e.g., whether the customer is happy or frustrated) and send automated real-time alerts to agents. Armed with the right information at the right time, agents can better adapt to each customer’s behavior, de-escalate potential conflicts, deliver an enhanced customer service experience, and improve customer satisfaction.

Increase upselling and cross-selling

Employing speech analytics software in call center environment can help boost revenues by identifying more upselling and cross-selling opportunities in customer interactions. For example, the software can spot customers’ pain points or buying signals, which indicate a customer is close to making a purchase. That enables agents to tailor their sales pitch accordingly to better address the customer’s needs.

The Future of Speech Analytics

Speech analytics has been around for decades – and has experienced massive improvements through AI advancements and broader adoption in recent years. Today, the speech analytics market is rapidly growing, driven by the increasing need to improve the overall customer experience, reduce customer attrition, enhance agent performance, and adhere to compliance and regulatory standards.

The research by Market Research Future (MRFR) estimated that the global speech analytics market is expected to reach a revenue of USD 9.33 billion by 2030, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.38% throughout the forecast period (2022–2030). It means that more organizations are planning to implement speech analytics technologies into their customer service operations in the foreseeable future.

Unlock the Power of Speech Analytics at Your Organization

If you aren’t yet using speech analytics and automated speech recognition technologies at your organization, you might be missing out on the massive benefits that come from embracing voice data insights. Intelligent AI-powered tools like VoiceSpin’s Speech Analyzer can significantly add to your bottom line by helping you increase customer satisfaction, enabling agents to deliver a better customer service experience with every interaction, driving sales, and providing cost-saving opportunities.

A range of features like keyword spotting, compliance monitoring, sentiment analysis, real-time alerts and post-call analytics, multi-layer reporting, automatic transcription and translation to 120+ languages, and seamless CRM integrations make VoiceSpin’s Speech Analyzer an effective speech analytics solution for small, mid-sized business, and large enterprises. To learn more about how speech analytics can help your organization unlock the power of voice data, contact us and schedule a free demo.

FAQs

How does speech analytics work?

Speech analytics uses Artificial Intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) technologies to capture and analyze data from voice interactions and transform it into comprehensive analytics. The system automatically transcribes audio into text in real time and then analyzes it by searching specific keywords and conducting sentiment analysis. The insights are then presented in the visual format to help call center managers better process and use it to improve contact center operations.

What is sentiment analysis in speech analytics?

Sentiment analysis is a specific technology within speech analytics that is able to determine the emotion and sentiment of a speaker expressed in a spoken language by using natural NLP and machine learning algorithms. It can classify the tone of a speech into positive, negative, or neutral. In the call center context, sentiment analysis data can provide call centers with helpful insights into customer experiences and can be used for business improvement.

What are the use cases for speech analytics in call centers?

Speech analytics solutions are used in call centers for various purposes. That includes quality assurance and maintaining high customer service standards, providing seamless service experiences, improving agent performance through personalized coaching and training, detecting and preventing potential fraud and compliance violations, improving overall call center efficiency, and generating more sales opportunities through upselling and cross-selling.