The average contact center receives 4,400 calls a month. Sifting all of these to find the calls that matter is time-consuming and tedious. In fact, we’ve found that it can take more than 20 minutes to review a six-minute call.
Luckily, this is where speech analytics can help. With the right speech analytics solutions, you can turn calls into greater insight to understand your customers better.
In this article, we’ll cover what speech analytics is, how it can benefit your contact center, and how it can help you turn tons of calls into valuable insights.
What Is Speech Analysis?
Speech analysis involves using software to transform audio into usable text and then analyze those calls for patterns and deeper meaning.
Speech analysis tools use speech recognition, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning (ML) to perform this process. The result is usable customer data, like actionable insights, customer sentiment, intent, and a deeper understanding of customer needs.
Additionally, speech analytics makes recorded calls easily searchable. This can be a gamechanger for organizations used to having tons of customer call recordings but little ability to utilize the calls at scale.
This helps you uncover how a customer is feeling about each topic and their mood during a call, which is known as customer sentiment.
Part of the value of conversation intelligence platforms is the ability to offer this analysis not only for calls, but text based conversations like chats, emails, and messages. This provides immediate feedback for additional use cases from agent QA to Voice of the Customer analysis.
💡 The Difference Between Conversation Intelligence and Speech Analytics
Conversation intelligence is about analyzing and reporting on the data gathered from every customer interaction across all your support channels. Speech analytics, on the other hand, is focused on analyzing your calls and turning them into text in order to more easily extract data. Often, conversation intelligence platforms offer speech analytics as a feature making them a more holistic option.
Speech analytics means you can better understand your customers and their needs, which can help you improve your contact center’s performance, your business, and customer satisfaction.
🤔 What are the challenges of speech analytics?
Traditionally, speech analysis involved QA analysts listening to calls, transcribing them, and attempting to analyze them themselves. This manual process was time-consuming and inefficient.
The development of speech analytics tools solved some of these problems because they automatically recorded and transcribed calls and turned them into text for analysis.
However, accents, colloquialisms, and changes in pitch and tone can often trip up transcription tools, meaning the text you get may not always be accurate. These factors may also not be recognized when a human analyzes call recordings. This means that the detection of customer sentiment may not be accurate either.
✅ How AI speech analytics helps
Newer speech analytics platforms that use artificial intelligence (AI) include features like sentiment detection. This allows you to get richer, more accurate data on things like the customer’s mood at different stages of the conversation.
With AI speech analytics, your platform will automatically discover and analyze words, phrases, and categories that give you insight into the customer experience.
AI speech analysis tools allow for quicker analysis, as they analyze calls in real time and can provide immediate insights. This saves your analyst’s time and makes your operations more efficient.
You’ll also get structured information about:
➡️ Common topics and conversational themes
➡️ Trending issues.
➡️ Emerging issues.
➡️ Conversation snippets for context.
➡️ Sentiment and Contact Drivers.
➡️ Competitor mentions.
These platforms help you identify the conversations that matter, like those regarding a recurring issue within your business that you need to fix.
For example, if your speech analytics reveals that customers are calling to complain about a specific product feature, you know you need to pass this insight on to your product development team so they can fix the issue.
👉 Yes, You Can Still Listen to Calls If Needed
Even if you use an AI conversation intelligence platform, there are probably instances where you want to listen to at least a portion of a calls or section of chat or email transcripts. The benefit is, the AI platform can pin point which conversations and even where within the conversation is a closer review warranted. For some organizations, this first-hand, qualitative understanding of the voice of the customer is an essential part of their customer experience. For others, having the data tell them which issues and agents are having the biggest impact on customers removes the need for this additional step.
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How AI Speech Analytics Platforms Work
Most AI-powered speech analytics platforms work in the following way:
1. Recording: The platform receives a recording from an organization’s phone or customer service interaction platform. 100% of customer conversations are captured in order to have complete coverage and insight.
2. Data processing: The platform uses speech recognition, transcription, and diarization to turn the audio recording into usable text-based transcript.
3. Analysis: The call is then run through AI and machine learning models to generate metadata, such as intent tagging/reasons for contact, customer sentiment, conversation quality, and dozens of other critical data points.
4. Insights: Your platform will deliver detailed reports on its analysis, including information about call quality, customer sentiment, agent performance, and compliance.
The Benefits of Getting Speech Analytics Right
There are a few ways that businesses can benefit from using speech analytics backed by AI:
👍 Improve the customer experience
Almost 68% of customers will leave a business as a result of a bad experience.
AI speech analytics provides detailed and actionable insights into your customer’s needs and behaviors, enabling you to improve the customer experience.
Sentiment analysis can help you identify what drives positive and negative customer experiences. Using speech analytics to improve the customer experience in real time.
👍 Improve your business
The insights you get from speech analytics don’t just help you improve your agent and contact center performance but also give you insights into how you can make meaningful changes to your entire business. This includes your product, policies, and marketing campaigns.
Let’s say you get a tonne of calls regarding payments. The problem could be because your payment portal is broken or because it is difficult to use. Perhaps you don’t provide enough payment options. Speech analytics will help you understand these root causes and what impact they have on the customer experience.
👍 Make your QA more efficient
As mentioned above, manual QA is time-consuming and inefficient. With speech analytics, you reduce the need for a time-intensive QA process, maximizing operational efficiency.
👍 Provide better coaching
Your contact center agents need regular coaching if you want them to perform better and provide improved service to your customers.
Speech analytics platforms analyze every call to provide rich insights, allowing you to coach your agents based on real data. This means you can create custom and tailored coaching sessions for individual agents.
How Loris Helps BILL with Targeted Sentiment Detection
Loris is an AI conversation intelligence platform that uses speech analytics to provide targeted sentiment detection. This allows QA analysts and CX leaders to rapidly determine the target of a customer’s sentiment, whether it’s toward your product, company, policies, or agents.
This can help leaders understand what drives customer satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) based on their interactions.
BILL, a financial operations platform, found its customer base growing at a massive rate and wanted to ensure it could keep up with that growth.
The company wanted to establish its customer service as a competitive advantage to stand out from the competition. They aimed to empower their agents with best-in-class capabilities to elevate the customer experience.
Thanks to Loris, Bill.com has improved its customer service. Its agents now understand customer sentiment in real time, helping them to know how the customer feels and what they can do about it.
Loris also helps Bill.com by providing its agents with customized template suggestions, which allows them to turn negative conversations into positive ones.
Additionally, with Loris, Bill.com’s leaders can quickly find important conversations, identify underlying and emerging issues, and rectify them before they become larger problems.
⭐️ A Word from BILL:
“We’re gaining a new level of access to customer sentiment that we haven’t been able to before, which is really helping us shape our customer experience strategy as a whole. Because the sentiment is real time, we are able to make changes in the customer experience before the customer leaves us.”
“The real time customer sentiment is a superpower that Loris enables for agents. It’s also a superpower for supervisors and managers from a coaching perspective.” — Bala Venkataramanan, VP and Head of CX at BILL.
Speak to a Loris Expert Today
Using advanced speech analytics and sentiment detection, Loris can help you monitor and analyze customer sentiment in real time.
This can help you provide better customer service, improve your business, make your QA process more efficient, and provide your agents with better coaching.
Visit our website today to speak to a Loris expert and learn how our platform can help you improve the customer experience with speech analytics and targeted sentiment detection.
