Ask the Experts: What Is Your Speech Analytics Definition?

The answer to the question “What is speech analytics?” may vary depending on who you ask.  For some, speech analytics may be the process of analyzing recorded calls to improve agent performance and the company’s bottom line.  For others, it may be monitoring calls for certain language or acoustic characteristics that can be used to determine the root cause of the customer call and thereby improve the customer experience.  For still others, it may be some combination of the above.

The fact of the matter is that there is no one speech analytics definition, as each company will find ways to leverage the technology in the appropriate way for that particular organization.  That said, it can be helpful to review the various definitions of speech analytics, particularly if your organization is evaluating speech analytics software to determine the right solution to meet your individual needs.

With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of expert insights on speech analytics from within the call center industry.  Enjoy!

1) 

“There are three main areas where speech analytics can improve the performance of contact centers and the enterprise as a whole. One, it can identify agents that aren’t handling certain parts of calls or different call types. This allows companies to identify training and coaching requirements. Two, it can deliver extensive insights into customer preferences, issues, and feelings, allowing companies to modify customer acquisition, retention and up-sell opportunities. Three, it can identify business process issues, product and service issues, and even propensity of certain customer groups to defect to the competition, thereby allowing companies to change these root causes and thus improve business performance overall.”

2) 

“Speech analytics delivers the ability to automatically search, identify, categorize, and cross-reference recorded speech based upon what is actually being said, the spoken content of verbal interactions.”

3) 

“Speech analytics tools are appealing because they allow companies to take action on unstructured data from customer interactions and gain rare insight about their customers. When used properly and with call center best practices, speech analytics software can give a company a significant competitive advantage, including improving the customer experience, coaching and monitoring call center agents, reducing operating expenses, identifying up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, and reducing customer attrition.”

4) 

“Speech analytics is the process of extracting relevant and vital content from a recorded audio file. It has the capability to automatically identify, categorize, and cross-reference important information regarding what is being said or the actual substance or meaning of the speech, not just individual words. In order to make this possible, speech analytics makes use of several types of software applications like automatic speech recognition and audio mining tools.”

5) 

“Speech analysis is primarily a call center function carried out by software designed to analyze real-time or recorded conversations between call center agents and inbound or outbound callers. Speech analysis covers a variety of technologies that work in different ways, some more advanced than others, but all ultimately designed to detect and track predefined spoken words or phrases. Speech analysis leads to actionable metrics that show customer satisfaction, agent performance, hold times, hang-ups, and any number of other KPIs.”

6) 

“Voices in the world of telephony are often captured by call recording solutions, only to be deleted as a matter of course or stored away for years never to be accessed or reviewed.  Speech analytics allows these voices to be heard, for the opinions, attitudes, and intentions customers and employees reveal during everyday conversations, then extracted and put to use improving performance, reducing risk, and driving profitability.  All too often, organizations are at risk because they cannot possibly know all of what is being said to them and by them – speech analytics allows them to know.”

7) 

“Speech analytics is typically comprised of a speech engine that converts speech to data, an indexing layer that makes it searchable, a query and search user interface to allow the user to define requirements and carry out searches, and reporting applications to present the analytics.”

Final Thoughts

The above list represents a collection of expert opinions on speech analytics.  No matter the definition, speech analytics offers organizations a host of advantages, including improved agent performance, enhanced interactions between agents and customers, and ultimately an improved customer experience overall.

What is your organization’s speech analytics definition?

©iStockphoto.com/Wavebreakmedia