Analytics

Speech Analytics: The Ultimate Guide to Boost your Sales

Contact centers in 2022 are investing in new-age technologies to analyze and employ data derived from phone conversations with prospects and customers.

Speech analytics is one such technology that allows companies to increase their sales by tailoring their interactions with prospects and enhancing sales pitches. And the outcome is a greater number of customer acquisitions.

Contact centers are also bringing this technology into play to deliver better customer service by analyzing customers’ interests and expectations, and training reps to handle complaints more effectively. So, if you are yet to integrate speech analytics into your system, it is high time to do so. 

What is Speech Analytics?

The term “speech analytics” is self-explanatory. This ingenious technology utilizes artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning to fetch data from speech and provide insights.

Speech analytics tools listen to audio conversations, transcribe them, and derive comprehensible data. 

Contact centers have been recording calls for monitoring purposes for years. But those recordings weren’t completely beneficial because listening to every call and manually analyzing them to extract meaningful insights was next to impossible. 

The customer conversation analytics software makes it possible. In fact, with speech analysis, you can ensure that 100% of your calls are assessed and analyzed.

A call center conversation analytics software is often integrated with voice analytics, which enables it to analyse sentiments, tone, and voice modulations of prospects and customers to procure interpretations. 

How Does Speech Analytics Work?

Taking raw speech and turning it into useful analytics is a step-by-step process.

  • The speech analytics software gathers audio conversations from the source (call recorder or VOIP stream). It also collects associated metadata, including customer and agent information, call time, and length.
  • The software turns all audio into text. It also extracts acoustic signals such as agitation and silence during speech processing. If the speech is gathered from different sources, the nuances of each source are also considered.
  • The system analyzes the interaction to identify patterns and categorizes them based on their characteristics.

Advanced analytics software also scores the speech on key metrics such as customer satisfaction, agent quality, emotion, and first contact resolution. Agents and supervisors can use these insights to improve customer interactions.

Types of Speech Analytics

Speech analytics can be divided into two types based on the time of analytics.

Real-Time Speech Analytics

Real-time speech analytics take place during live voice calls with customers. It allows agents to understand customer sentiment and emotion at the moment, as well as their buying intent.

This way, agents can better deal with customers’ issues.

Advanced speech analytics call center software also provides real-time cues to agents to enhance the customer experience. Real-time interaction insights coupled with real-time monitoring can improve agents’ performance by many folds.

Post-Call Speech analytics

As the name suggests, post-call analytics provide insights after the call ends. In other words, it is the analysis of recorded calls.

Call centers often perform post-call speech analytics for quality management and assurance purposes. It helps customer support managers and agents identify key patterns and trends, such as the most commonly used phrases.

For instance, if managers want to track how often the word ‘refund’ or ‘issue’ are used, they can create a query with these keywords and have the post-call analytics software follow them on large volumes of calls.

Running such queries help managers identify the root cause of a product/service issue.

5 Key Benefits of Speech Analytics

The actionable insights derived from speech analytics software can benefit businesses in the following ways.

Increase Customer Satisfaction

Evaluating the efficacy of the resolution process is vital to improving customer satisfaction.

Using speech analytics software, agents can identify trending issues that may have been overlooked. They can then take steps to address the problem and measure its effectiveness by monitoring customer sentiment post-implementation.

80% of the world’s data is locked up in voice conversation, and businesses that tap into this source can outsmart their competitors in providing a stellar customer experience.

Improve Agent Performance

Analytics software process voice inputs and interpret customer sentiment quite accurately. If agents identify communication issues in real-time, they can make proactive improvements.

Powered with AI, they also suggest answers to common customer queries, enabling faster resolution and higher agent productivity. It gives agents more time to deal with complex tasks.

Drive Operational Efficiency

Call center speech analytics can also help improve efficiency and decrease repeat calls. Here are some examples of improved efficiency:

  • Increased automated call monitors
  • Reduced phone calls as a result of root cause analysis
  • Reduced instances of agents providing incorrect information
  • Access to assistive agents to respond to customer queries more effectively

Mitigate Compliance Risk

Speech analytics software can flag compliance breaches in real-time, helping companies prevent deviation from established laws and guidelines.

It is especially important for industries like finance, banking, and healthcare, which are guarded by stringent regulatory requirements.

Reduce Cost

Speech analytics software helps companies avoid unnecessary callbacks, thereby cutting costs. It also helps save agents time by directing queries to cost-effective channels like IVR or online self-service.

Moreover, the software’s automation capabilities can reduce agent headcount while improving resolution rates.

How Speech Analytics Can Help You Boost Sales?

Speech analytics is a component of business intelligence that allows you to understand prospects’ expectations and potential to convert better.

According to Salesforce research, 52% of customers are extremely or somewhat likely to switch brands if the company doesn’t make an effort to personalize communications with them. Similarly, in a B2B world, 89% of buyers confirmed that they expect companies to understand their business needs and expectations. Here are some ways speech analytics can fill the existing gaps in the sales ecosystem:

Tailored Sales Call Scripts

Customers today are highly aware of their needs and the way they want to be treated. Hence, you can’t bank on the generic sales call scripts. Speech analytics for sales helps you tailor your sales communications based on a prospect’s interests and conversation pattern. This, in turn, results in a higher number of conversions. 

Better Conversions

A tool that gauges a prospect’s speech on a call with your rep and produces real-time insights, can be a revolutionary addition to your technology stack.

The conversational speech analytics data helps you identify a lead and gather all the context within seconds of the call. You can then use this data to understand the prospect’s requirements and navigate them in the right direction with efficient and personalized interactions. 

Improved Customer Relationships

No one wants to be treated as a sales number anymore. With so many calls flooding in, the reps hardly get time to connect with prospects and build rapport.

Voice analytics software, embedded with speech analytics for sales, extracts insights based on sentiments and satisfaction levels. It then presents elaborative data about prospects and allows reps to develop human connections. The insights also enable you to take pre-emptive measures and reduce the churn rate

Profound Sales Training

The rich insights and real-time call transcriptions help gauge sales reps’ performances. You can use this data to identify areas of improvement for each rep and provide data-backed training. This data is also substantial to train new joiners on frequently occurring scenarios. 

How Speech Analytics Can Help You Improve Customer Service?

Call center speech analytics helps you attain operational excellence in your contact centers. From the fastest feedback to on-call escalations, the technology enables you to facilitate better call resolutions and increased customer satisfaction

Did you know that businesses in the U.S. lose around $62 bn every year due to poor customer experience? You can easily address this leakage with modern solutions. 

Maintain Quality 

Call quality depends on various parameters known as Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for reps. The conventional ways of quality assessment include listening to a few calls and assigning quality scores for every element defined in the KPIs. But this method wouldn’t ensure 100% transparency. 

There are many factors that can affect call quality. For Example, a rep can be more attentive and energetic at the beginning of the day and may not maintain the quality parameters towards the end of their shift. 

With conversational speech analytics software, supervisors and managers can assess all the calls in real-time and share feedback to improve on the next call. This ensures maximum call resolutions and customer satisfaction. 

The analytics software also enables supervisors and managers to take control of situations where a rep needs assistance. This, in turn, reduces average call handling time, and first-call resolutions result in lesser call volume. 

Identify Dissatisfied Customers 

The majority of the customers calling a customer service center are dissatisfied. While some issues and concerns can be resolved on call and make customers happy, some complaints are unsolvable. Such issues often lead to an increased churn rate. 

By analyzing customer speech in real-time, you can identify root causes for customer dissatisfaction and offer appropriate solutions. You also get to track how your reps are handling irate or dissatisfied customers and introduce relevant training programs for them. 

Call center speech analytics helps you identify gaps and take measures to achieve optimum customer loyalty. 

Avoid The Risk of Non-Compliance

All call centers have to abide by certain compliances, infringement of which may attract fines and negative publicity. But with so many reps taking thousands of calls regularly, sometimes compliance issues occur. Speech analytics software can send real-time alerts to reps if they happen to use certain keywords or phrases that fall in the non-compliance zone. 

Enhance Performance and Productivity

The data produced by a call center speech analytics software offers insights and allows keyword filtering. You can collect and organize data to identify who is not performing well. Their call data can be used to derive further insights into the areas where they need improvement and should be trained on. This way, you can enhance your call center reps’ performances

Similarly, since managers, supervisors, and analysts don’t need to monitor individual calls, they can effectively use this time to perform more productive tasks. Speech analytics provides clear transcription and deeper insights that can easily be used to devise better strategies for improved customer experience

Understand Your Customers Better

This goes without saying that a complete transcription of customer calls and real-time conversion into comprehensible data create a better opportunity for you to understand your customers better. The more you know what your customers want, the better you can serve them. 

You can use the rich insights and sentiment analysis extracted by voice analytics to personalize communications and improve your services. 

 7 Speech Analytics Use Cases

Speech analytics software has numerous use cases that fit various industries.

Customer Service

The most common use case of speech analytics software is analyzing customer satisfaction. Contact center managers employ the software to identify trends and patterns in customer queries and feedback.

It helps them identify areas of improvement so they can provide better customer service.

Market Research

Speech analytics software enables enterprises to perform broad analytics on internal and external market data to understand customer preferences and attitudes better.

Employing speech analytics across different digital channels can help businesses effectively predict customer churn, so they can take sufficient preventive measures.

Fraud Detection

Frauds through phone calls have significantly increased over the past few years, and speech analytics software is becoming a popular tool for detecting them.

The tool assesses phrases, keywords, and voice acoustics and alerts users of fraud-like behaviours in real-time. This way, a person is less likely to take the wrong step and become a fraud victim.

Sentiment Analysis

While traditional sentiment analysis mainly relied on text reviews, surveys, and feedback, speech analytics software analyzes spoken words to determine the caller’s emotion. Agents can use the insight to customize their conversations.

Sentiment analysis also helps agents identify the right upselling and cross-selling opportunities, as happy customers are more receptive to advice and pitches.

Language Translation

Speech analytics software automatically transcribes conversations into written texts.

The texts can then be translated into different languages. It empowers businesses to reach out to larger and more diverse customer groups.

Competitive Analysis

Customers often compare organizations with their competitors. Speech analytic tools can tally all customer mentions of competitors so managers can contextually analyze them.

The frequency and causes of competitor mentions can help businesses make critical decisions related to pricing, product design, advertising, etc.

Agent Training

Training agents to deliver excellent customer experience isn’t easy. It requires in-depth performance insights and objective feedback.

AI-powered speech analytics combined with automatic scoring can strengthen quality monitoring methods and upgrade the training experience for both agents and trainers.

What To Look For in A Speech Analytics Tool?

Speech analytics is an extensive technology that covers many features based on the purpose it will be used for. The presence of features varies from software to software depending upon the provider you choose, the package you opt for, and your business needs.

Below are some of the common features to look for.

Intuitive User Interface

The tool you choose should be easy-to-learn and easy to use. The easier and the more intuitive the interface is, the lesser time it would take you to embed it in your system. The intuitive software will be easy to implement, train, and mature in your call center. 

Real-Time Analytics

Your tool should be able to offer both, post-recording analysis and real-time analysis. Real-time analytics will help you identify issues right on the call, and you can handle such situations better before they worsen. Conclusively, it allows you to control the churn rate and convert more in case of sales. 

Emotion and Sentiment Analysis

The earlier versions of speech analysis would only facilitate transcriptions. But with the advanced integration of speech and voice analytics, you must be able to derive emotion and sentiment analysis from customer conversations. Modern speech analysis software reads variations in voice, pitch, and tone and identifies varying emotions. Sentiment detection gives you elaborative insights and makes room for data-backed customization. 

Scorecards That Automatically Categorize Data

Speech analytics is an effective software to evaluate employees’ performances in a call center. If you have finally decided to invest in this tool, you must ensure that it facilitates automated scoring of calls based on various quality criteria. The scorecards should also be categorized and displayed in simple charts for easy performance measurement. 

Keyword Search Facility

One of the main functions of call center speech analytics software is to enable organized searches for keywords and phrases. You should be able to sort and filter the data based on any given keywords to run reports and measure customer concerns and sentiments. The reports can be used to look for trends and reasons for customer dissatisfaction so that you can ensure better resolutions to improve customer experience

Automated Reports

At the end of the day, a contact center’s productivity is judged on the total number of calls, percentage of resolved issues, and CSAT scores (customer satisfaction score). Managers spend many hours a day pulling these reports and sharing data across the production floor. 

Modern speech analytics tool gives you automated reports on a rep’s day-to-day performance and makes it easy to coach them based on their weak areas. This automation would also save managers a lot of time, which they can invest in more productive activities, such as constructive feedback sharing and one-to-one coaching, etc. 

Contextual Speech-to-Text

A speech analytics tool is well-equipped with artificial intelligence and natural language processing to analyze context and produce the most accurate data. This is what a simple text-to-speech program does not do. Contextual transcription gives deeper insights into customers’ sentiments and expectations by reading pauses, anger, and similar emotions in the speech. 

Sensitive Data Redaction

Sensitive data about customers or the company can lead to non-compliance if not handled carefully. The software should be able to analyze and redact sensitive data while transcribing speech so that you don’t accidentally store compliance-sensitive words or phrases. 

Topic-Wise Categorization

Topic-wise classification of calls makes it easy for various departments to look into relevant data and derive conclusions. Call center managers can easily look at the category of the calls and analyze a particular group to identify repeated issues. 

5 Challenges with Speech Analytic Tools

Though speech analytic tools offer multiple use cases, they are fraught with challenges, as mentioned below. Identifying and addressing these challenges with help organizations better harness the power of the technology.

Speech Analytics Technology Is Not Yet Mainstream

The use of speech analytics software has not yet become mainstream for businesses other than call centers. Despite being around for some time, they have not gone far from the early adopter stage.

Awareness of technology’s benefits for all can help fill this demand gap.

Speech analytics Use Cases Aren’t Fully Explored

Speech analytic software takes quality assurance testing to an efficiency level, which is impossible with manual testing. 

But despite their vast potential to improve customer relationships, the tools are still underutilized.

Some lesser-explored use cases of speech analytics include identifying cross-selling and upselling opportunities, fraud detection, competitor analysis, ensuring call etiquette, and training call center employees.

Successful Speech Analytics Requires an Enterprise-Wide Change

While speech analytics may provide accurate insights, the challenge lies in applying those findings to conversations. 

Capitalizing on the insights requires a behavioral and procedural overhaul in the organization. Such changes are not easy but necessary to get the desired results.

Rise of Text-Centered Communication

With the rise of text-centered communication, many predicted that voice as a customer touch point would reduce. 

However, the importance of voice calls is not going away. It can create a human-to-human connection that no other medium has.

61% of customers still prefer to speak to someone over the phone when they require assistance.

AI-Powered Speech Analytics Can Be Expensive

Most businesses employ the more basic form of speech analytic tools. While these are more efficient than manual analysis systems, their full potential lies in integrating them with predictive analytics tools. 

However, the integration of two technologies can be costly for some businesses.

Choosing The Best Speech Analytics Software

The above features are pretty much comprehensive of what you should look for in speech analytics for call centers. Your best bet would be highly dependent on your business needs.

  • Understand the gaps in your call center and analyze your business needs and goals. 
  • List down the main features that would serve the purpose of your contact center. 
  • Estimate your budget and look for available options within it. 
  • Carry out thorough research and compare different solutions. You should also contact the solution providers to inquire more about their software. 
  • Also, consider various deployment models and how well the software can be integrated into your existing system. 

You should take your time, look for testimonials and demos, and then decide on the best voice of customer analytics software for your business. 

The Importance of “Real-Time”

Throughout this blog post, the instances of “real-time” are recurring. And there’s a good reason for it!

Real-time analytics is a critical aspect of speech analytics software, providing valuable insights into customer interactions as they happen. Real-time analytics examples include call monitoring, sentiment analysis, and transcription. These enable businesses to respond quickly and effectively to customer needs.

Talking about what real-time analytics is specifically – It’s the process of collecting and analyzing data as it’s generated, providing immediate insights that enable businesses to make informed decisions in real-time. 

In the context of speech analytics software, real-time analytics is crucial because it allows agents to receive assistance during live calls, providing them with the support they need to address customer issues and improve customer satisfaction.

The benefits of speech analytics are clear, but choosing a solution that offers real-time capabilities is equally important. So, it is one of the key considerations when choosing the best speech analytics software.

Remember, post-call analysis is a post-mortem, and agents need assistance during live calls to ensure positive outcomes. By investing in speech analytics software with real-time features, businesses can improve agent performance and drive business growth

JustCall IQ: The Complete Speech Analytics Stack

JustCall IQ is a leading conversation intelligence solution. It comes bundled with JustCall’s premium plan. JustCall is a leading cloud phone system that’s trusted by 6,000+ businesses around the world.

JustCall IQ packs advanced features, such as speech analytics, real-time transcription, AI-based scoring, conversational insights, and much more. It not only strengthens your sales and customer service but also equips you with the necessary tools to enhance your in-house training. 

Explore the endless capabilities of this robust speech analytics solution and embark on the journey of improved productivity. 

Scale up your business with AI and automation. Sign up today for JustCall and get a 70% discount in the first month. Or schedule a free demo and find out how JustCall IQ can help your business.

Empower Your Sales and Customer Service Teams

With the increasing number of organizations realizing the potential of call data, more and more contact centers are now opting for speech analytics and voice analytics software

You can easily get rid of micromanagement and operational hitches with rich data insights and real-time performance evaluations. Modern speech analytics for call centers can help you achieve business excellence and set you on the path to success. 

Customer conversation analytics opens a whole new world of business opportunities and customer acquisition for you. So, if you are looking to improve your sales, customer service, and agent training, speech analytics is your go-to solution. 

FAQs

What is AI speech analytics?

AI speech analytics are powered by artificial intelligence to provide real-time customer insights. They help contact center agents identify customer sentiments and use transcribed information to recommend ideal solutions.

What do you mean by speech analysis?

Speech analysis refers to analyzing live or recorded calls to derive useful metrics like customer satisfaction, sentiment, common queries, or trends. These insights help improve conversation and build stronger customer relationships.

Why is speech analytics important?

Speech analytics are important as they:

  • Improve customer satisfaction
  • Improve agent’s performance
  • Drive operational efficiency
  • Mitigate compliance risk
  • Reduce cost

 

How can speech analytics improve customer service?

Speech analytics can improve customer service in the following ways:

  • Maintaining exceptional call quality
  • Identifying the root cause of customer dissatisfaction and offering solutions
  • Enhancing agents’ performance and productivity
  • Enabling personalization with rich sentiment analysis
What are the best practices for implementing speech analytics?

Here are the best practices for implementing speech analytics:

  • Identify use cases before implementing
  • Combine with text analytics for a holistic customer picture
  • Implement analytics in phase while continuously monitoring KPIs
  • Choose a solution that integrates with your existing system
  • Train your employees for maximum utilization of the technology
What are the common challenges with speech analytics and how to overcome them?

The main challenge with speech analytics is that its use cases are still unexplored in many industries. Also, its implementation requires cost investment and the willingness of the organization to adapt to the technology.

Increasing awareness of the benefits and use cases of the technology can help overcome these challenges.

What are the key features to look for in a speech analytics solution?

The key features to look for in a speech analytics solution are:

  • Real-time analytics capabilities
  • Automated scoring for call categorization
  • Keyword search facility
  • Easy-to-read reporting dashboards
  • Multichannel analytics capability
  • Data masking/redaction for sensitive data
  • Contextual Speech-to-text

With over a decade of experience in the SaaS industry, Rahul currently oversees the Customer Success team for the Americas region. He has been a key figure in establishing, scaling, and also crafting the strategic vision for the department. Specializing in the digitization of customer success processes, Rahul excels at creating and executing operational playbooks aimed at boosting customer retention and renewals. Under his leadership, the team has achieved significant gains in NRR and NPS, elevating overall customer advocacy. Over the past four years, Rahul has held similar high-impact roles in various organizations, consistently contributing to their success.

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