What is call analytics? Measurement, reporting & more

Call analytics is a valuable tool for many business functions, such as call center operations, customer service, and sales. These departments have regular interactions with prospects and customers, and these conversations play a significant role in customer satisfaction, customer experience, and customer loyalty.

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Companies that haven’t leveraged call center analytics are often unsure about how it works, the benefits it can offer their businesses, and measurement and reporting options. As a result, it’s challenging to choose the right call center analytics software and sales intelligence software to meet the business’s needs — and to leverage the technology to its fullest potential to drive business results.

In this article, we’ll provide an overview of call analytics, measurement and reporting options, and other things you need to know to understand how call analytics can benefit your business. First, let’s review what call analytics is.

What is call analytics?

Call analytics is a technology solution that evaluates and analyzes customer conversations that take place via phone. It makes analyzing phone conversations efficient and enables businesses to monitor, measure, and report on key performance indicators (KPIs), whether it’s used by a call center, customer service department, sales team, or another business unit.

How does call analytics work?

Call analytics, a form of business intelligence, delivers insights into call center agent performance and the experience of customers that engage with your business over the phone by collecting unstructured data from customer conversations and turning it into structured data, which is then analyzed for insight. These insights are vital for training, performance management, sales effectiveness, and customer experience management.

There are five key steps in the call analytics process:

1. Capturing audio interactions through a voice recording system
2. Transcribing conversations and measuring acoustics to assess emotion
3. Classification to derive the meaning of speech through inflection and emotion in words, phrases, and acoustics
4. Automated scoring to convert data into structured intelligence
5. Searching, discovering, analyzing, comparing, and reporting on the data

Call analytics measurement

Call analytics software, also called speech analytics software, transcribes conversations and measures vocal acoustics to assess the meaning and context of what customers are saying. Emotion and sentiment analysis evaluates how customers feel about the brand and their interactions with the company. This analysis, often driven by artificial intelligence (AI), provides insight into customers’ opinions, what they want, and how to meet their needs.

Call analytics measures a number of factors, including:

• The nature and strength of customer emotion
• The meaning of speech, classified using machine learning technology
• Satisfaction or dissatisfaction with products, services, or interactions
• Compliance with scripts and legal requirements
• Agent quality and effectiveness
• Customer experience quality
• Customer effort
• Predictive metrics to track emotion and performance over time

Call analytics reporting

Call analytics reporting generally comes in graphical formats that enable companies to visualize measurements and track changes over time. These formats include charts, graphs, and dashboards that users can customize to extract precise information and compare data points.

Dashboards contain a number of measurements, scores, and analyses focused on customer experience, agent performance, quality assurance, and other areas. Advanced call analytics solutions, such as CallMiner Eureka, offer real-time visibility through dashboards available to different roles to automate processes. For instance, agents may have access to agent performance dashboards, allowing agents to adjust in real time and improve the quality of their interactions. Managers may have access to broader agent performance dashboards that provide visibility into the performance of different teams, agents, or business lines.

What to look for in a call analytics solution

Selecting the right call analytics solution is essential for getting the maximum value from your investment. Here are a few essential features to look for when evaluating and selecting a call analytics solution.

Omnichannel analytics

The best call analytics solutions go well beyond phone calls and voice conversations. Today’s customers interact with brands through a variety of channels, such as email, live chat, self-service options, social media, and more. By analyzing phone calls only, you’ll miss significant opportunities to gain insights into the entire customer journey across all channels and touchpoints. While you could use separate solutions to analyze data from each channel individually, only an omnichannel analytics solution breaks down silos for deeper customer insights.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning

Artificial intelligence and machine learning enable call analytics solutions to identify patterns and build predictive models, analyze customer sentiment and emotion, predict NPS scores, anticipate customer churn, and assess customers’ likelihood to purchase. With real-time insights into what drives customer behavior, your representatives can take in-the-moment action to ensure positive outcomes from customer interactions.

Integration with other technologies

Your business is likely using other technologies, such as customer relationship management (CRM) solutions and business intelligence (BI) tools. A call analytics solution should integrate seamlessly with your other tools to provide a holistic view of your customers.

Customer journey mapping

Understanding the complete customer journey is critical for driving a positive customer experience. Look for a call analytics solution that enables customer journey mapping to identify how various touchpoints impact customer behavior and customer satisfaction.

Customizable dashboards and granular analysis

Every business is unique, and your company’s KPIs and goals may differ from others. That’s why it’s imperative to select a call analytics solution with the flexibility to create customized dashboards to visualize the precise data your team needs to inform decision-making in the moment. Additionally, the best call analytics solutions allow you to drill down to explore the details in your data.

Today’s companies face tough competition, and the customer experience is a key differentiator. Call analytics is a valuable tool that offers many benefits for businesses, but it’s not enough to compete in today’s competitive landscape. Omnichannel analytics solutions, such as CallMiner, go beyond analyzing phone conversations, providing the insights necessary to inform decision-making, improve business performance, and drive positive outcomes.