What is Speech Analytics?

Speech analytics is the process of analysing speech to better understand customers. It can be used in contact centres or customer experience research to find out what people are saying about your business and how you're doing. The data collected through speech analytics can provide you with insights into customer sentiment, what they want from your business, and more.  

Speech analytics can help you identify customer pain points and how to improve your business as a whole. 

Better customer experience (CX) is just one of the ways in which speech analytics can help your business. When it comes to utilising speech analytics, the potential benefits are enormous. As this technology grows in popularity, getting the insights you want about consumer sentiment towards your brand or services will become even easier. 

Speech analytics can assist across a wide section of business verticals, from customer service to financial services and healthcare. No matter what industry you are in, speech analytics can benefit your company as a whole, as well as the individual functions within it. 

How Does Speech Analytics Work? 

Speech analytics extracts structured data like which agent handled the interaction, the time of day it occurred, the length of the call, and who the customer was from unstructured conversation audio. The sounds are converted into text using a speech recognition algorithm. Acoustic signals such as tempo, loudness, and silence are also extracted simultaneously. 

Next, all data is standardised into a uniform format across channels. This allows businesses to track a consumer's journey and repeat contacts regardless of the channel used. For PCI compliance, both the recording and transcript are blanked out to eliminate social security numbers, credit card numbers, and other sensitive information. 

The end result is a uniform analysis across all data sources, as well as actionable voice of the customer insights that may be shared throughout the company. Some analytics platforms allow you to extract insights from the  platform and export and incorporate them into other 3rd-party applications in order to meet a variety of business demands. 

5 Common Benefits for Speech Analytics 

Below, we look at 5 ways in which speech analytics can drive value to most businesses, regardless of industry or vertical. 

1. Increase the number of first contact resolutions 

Speech analytics helps improve FCR by identifying what’s causing customer issues. This allows the business to take appropriate action, such as reaching out to customers for proactive service or helping agents resolve complex cases faster with pre-emptive information about an account. 

Speech analytics helps businesses reduce their FCR by identifying trends in specific speech patterns and correlating them with known contact sources (e.g., social media). This allows businesses to quickly resolve issues before they escalate into larger problems that could negatively impact the customer relationship or bottom line. 

Speech analytics can help contact centres within retail, insurance, and financial services provide customers with a more satisfactory experience by enabling them to solve common issues faster through speech recognition technology.  

2. Reduce customer churn significantly 

Speech analytics helps improve customer churn by identifying speech patterns of customers who are likely to churn. Higher customer satisfaction and improved FCR will help businesses reduce the number of churned accounts 

Speech analytics helps contact centres within retail, insurance, and financial services provide customers with a more satisfactory experience by enabling them to identify speech patterns that indicate when a customer is about to leave. 

3. Look for cross-sell and upsell opportunities 

Speech analytics helps look for cross-sell and upsell opportunities by identifying speech patterns that indicate interest in products or services. This allows businesses to quickly identify where they should be investing their efforts when it comes to upselling and cross-selling. 

It helps provide customers with a more satisfactory experience by enabling them to look for speech patterns that indicate they are considering a purchase or switching to a competitor. 

4. Spot emerging demands from customers quickly 

Speech analytics helps identify emerging demands from customers by identifying speech patterns that indicate the customer is having issues with products or services. This allows businesses to quickly pinpoint emerging trends and take action. 

It helps provide customers with a more satisfactory experience by identifying speech patterns that indicate the customer is looking for new products and/or services.  This allows businesses to quickly identify where they should be investing their efforts when it comes to upselling and cross-selling. 

5. Ensure regulatory compliance 

Speech analytics helps improve regulatory compliance by identifying speech patterns that indicate non-compliance with relevant industry regulations. This allows businesses to quickly identify where they should be investing their efforts when it comes to helping agents meet compliance requirements.