Q&A on Best Practices and Guidelines for Purchasing Speech Analytics Webinar

Recently I had the pleasure of speaking on a webinar, Best Practices and Guidelines Purchasing Speech Analytics with Colin Taylor, CEO & Chief Chaos Officer of The Taylor Reach Group on guidelines to follow when purchasing speech analytics. Participants learned the importance of a request for proposal (RFP), what to include, the proper way to evaluate the vendor responses, and how to choose a solution that is best for their company. In addition, participants learned best practices for successful implementation once they choose a speech analytics vendor.

We had an amazing discussion and some great questions from our participants. For those of you weren’t able to attend the webinar, you can watch the replay here. But I wanted to share with you some of the questions, answers, and takeaways from the webinar.

Are you seeing more organizations going cloud-based with their solution or premise-based?

It depends on the technology in question. There is a popular mindset that the cloud is the solution to everything. But, it really depends on the organization and where they are in regards to security, cost, and convenience.

The cloud-based popularity is a reflection of less complexity. When you choose hosted, you don’t have to worry about server configurations in the beginning or when expansion is necessary. Security is always going to be a valid concern. When you review your provider, check all the elements of concern that are relevant to your contact center.

The cloud is the platform of choice for the future. As individual firms, we need to ensure that we are protecting our data appropriately and not creating potential problems like putting unencrypted data in the cloud. The CallMiner approach where everything is redacted is the way to move forward.

Could you give a real-life example of how speech analytics help with achieving compliance?

Speech analytics can be very helpful. 100% of calls are recorded, 100% are analyzed, and you can look for specific words or phrases. The redaction process to ensure PCI information is properly recorded and saved can instantly take an organization from being out of compliance with unencrypted recordings to complying. Speech analytics can also instantly identify where gaps exist in compliance with regards to personnel or at the processes level.

We are having a tough time coming up with a business case with specific tangible benefits (i.e., ROI), do you have suggestions on how to approach this?

Each organization may find a slightly different attractiveness and benefits of the solution. If you look specifically at speech analytics from a compliance perspective, it will allow you to enhance your agent quality programs and performance management programs. You get insight into a much broader sampling of calls since most quality programs deal with less than 1% of interactions. By being able to improve the quality of interactions through speech analytics, you will have a significant impact on customer satisfaction and first contact resolution.

Calculating first call resolution (FCR) is relatively straightforward. Calculating customer satisfaction (CSAT) or even employee satisfaction (ESAT) is more difficult. We’ve seen statistics say on average a 1% improvement in CSAT is worth more than $250,000. Every organization has to build their own use case to calculate return on investment (ROI).

If you can’t find ROI in the first six months to a year of deploying your speech analytics program, there is something wrong with your analytics program. We invite you to check out Callminer’s ROI calculator tool and whitepaper with examples of customers that have experienced ROI.

Can you recommend an approximate number of interaction analysts versus number of contacts?

We have many organizations that have 4,000 to 5,000 agents, and they have an analyst team of three to four. If you do manual monitoring and evaluation of agent performance, you might have one QA for every 10-15 agents, by automating it, you can repurpose employees from the QA role to interaction analyst’s role. In the QA environment, we have seen a 50-80 percent reduction in staffing requirements where they were able to repurpose those individuals to support the automated processes.

Hear my full conversation with Colin Taylor and download the webinar slides.