Call centers undergo thousands of phone call interactions in a day to solve the customer’s queries. Every call center department of any business works for customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction and retention are the top priorities of customer care executives. According to Forrester Research, acquiring new customers can cost five times more than satisfying and retaining current customers. New Gen technology like Artificial Intelligence is being used in managing and improving call center operations. One of the widely used AI techniques for the growth of the call center industry is “Speech Analytics”.

Speech Analytics is the process which transcribes and analyses customer calls. The gathered information from recorded calls helps solve customer problems and provide them with quality services. Speech Analytics uses automatic speech recognition to understand call center conversations in natural language. It recognizes phrases and keywords spoken during the conversation, also called audio mining. 

 

 

 How do the Speech Analytics Approach Work?

Speech analysis of customers

Speech Analytics’ vendors use AI-powered engines to understand customer needs and call center operations. The various approaches used are:

 Keyword Spotting:

In this approach, voice recognition is applied to some specific keywords or phrases. You have to set-up the keyword list with selected specific keywords/phrases. It identifies specific words spoken in your call-center conversations. These can be used to trigger a variety of actions like upselling/cross-selling, categorizing calls, or create alerts for high-priority actions. Keyword spotting rules can be customized which can then perform custom actions. Many contact-centers use keyword spotting to identify purchase intent of customers, tag calls for customer satisfaction review, and score leads. This approach is useful to detect some common issues which the customer faces very often. 

Phonetic Indexing:

Here, the waveform of your call recordings is broken into phonemes (the smallest units of sound that make up language). These phonemes are analyzed in sequence to match the custom search criteria. The phonemes are recognized, stored and indexed in the database along with the search term phonemes. They are then matched against the phonetic index. 

 Once the phonemes are translated then the repeat searches can be done. The user doesn’t have to repeat and modify the keyword list for every new search. It is a flexible approach to find new words as it is not limited to the list of pre-defined words. 

LVCSR (Large-Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition):

Much like the phonetic approach, the LVCSR recognizes the phonemes first. In the next step, it produces the transcription of those phonemes, by applying language model or dictionaries of around 50,000-100,000 words and phrases. LVCSR requires more processing power and time as it recognizes and transcripts every word. The resulting transcription helps the contact centers to use the gathered information more efficiently. 

Machine Learning or Deep Learning Based Categorization:

Analytics of conversation with impromptu improvisation are difficult to analyze with fixed keywords and key phrase based approach. Additionally, analysis parameters that are contextual are also difficult to analyze with rule-based approaches. In such cases, machine learning models are leveraged to provide analysis.

 

 

Benefits of Speech Analysis for Call Centers:

Speech Analytics is a call center

Develop Training and Coaching Methods for Improvements of Tele Callers/Agents:  

The contact center agents are responsible for the interactions with the customer. The agents should be well trained for successful and effective interaction with the customer. Agent performance analysis based on Speech Analytics insight will assist supervisors and managers to appreciate and encourage good performing agents. They can reward and promote them. Trainers can detect low performers and can train them with enhanced training methods. Lags of other departments can be resolved with help of intelligent information produced through Speech Analytics.     

Develop Business Processes:

The information gathered by Speech Analytics can assist the managers, supervisors to detect the positive as well as negative entities or activities taking place in the organization. Due to this, the befitting steps can be implemented further such as

      1. Reducing extra expenditure on unnecessary activities
      2. Assigning the  right task to the right employee
      3. Improving and speeding up the processes that need concentration. 

Maintaining Business Expenditure:

The knowledgeable insight of several business operations enables top-level authorities to deeply interrogate business expenditures. Due to this, necessary business actions can be performed such as:

      1. Discovering overlooked business activities and fulfilling them with required business resources. 
      2. Detecting and controlling unnecessary expenditure. 
      3. Fulfilling demand of required business resources. 
      4. Human resource analysis can help to find good performers, outperformers and low            performer staff so that right promotion, appreciation, rewards and training can be provided accordingly. The appropriate job position could be assigned to the deserving candidates.

Preventing Customer Loss:

The customer always seeks for the flexible, innovative and easy solutions to his problem, if your services meet such requirements you can win the loyalty of the customer. The power of several Speech Analytics features enables us to detect and overcome various business threats that may cause customer loss. Evaluating and solving such business threats will help managers, directors to discover future challenges, technological trends to bring innovation in the brand. 

Call Center Indices Development:

The call center is the guiding hope for your customer. They hope to get a solution to the problem they are facing with your product/service. If they don’t get the solution to the problem, then there is a huge possibility of losing that customer. To avoid that, the quality control of the call center operations must be improved.

The following things can be examined through Speech Analytics: 

      1. Lags (example- Average Handle Time etc)
      2. Agent Performance
      3. Evaluation of Agent Training 
      4. Supervisor Performance 
      5. Cost-Effectiveness 

These processes in the call center can be improved by speeding up the slow processes. It will also improve customer experience with quick resolution of queries. AI-powered speech analytics can make your call centers future-ready by giving those trends and opportunities.

Get the Knowledge of Customer Intent:

With Speech Analytics, a customer’s emotions can be detected by the spoken words while on call. Having brief knowledge of customer behaviour is very important to improve the quality of service/product. Enterprises can get several advantages after getting knowledge of customer behavior. To prevent customer loss, agents should solve the issues of annoying customers on high priority. Solve their issues before they go out of hand and give negative reviews. From happy customers, agents can get feedback to further improve product/service quality. The deep insight into customers’ behavior gives strength to outperform in a competitive landscape.  

Sentiment Analysis:

In Sentiment Analysis, the context of the conversation and the acoustic characteristics of the voice are combined into a single call score. This call score can be further used to evaluate the emotion of a speaker. This procedure determines whether the extracted information of the speaker is positive, negative or neutral about the brand. The integration of speech analytics and sentiment analysis works better to understand the emotion of the customer about the brand.

 

 

Things to Consider Before Implementing Speech Analytics:

growth after implementing speech analytics

Identify your Business Needs:

Speech Analytics is a powerful solution that produces knowledgeable insight about business operations. Before implementing Speech Analytics, clarification and determination of business goals are essential. The top management will analyze Speech Analytics data and direct business activities in the right path to meet the goals.  

Technical Constraints:

Speech Analytics is the technology itself that is further integrated into the telephony of the contact center. Technical equipment might have errors sometimes, and Speech Analytics working can affect. Before it’s installation, take the vendor’s help to solve any technical issues in the contact center to avoid future problems. The experts at Kwantics assist with entire technical support to contact centers.    

Choose an Experienced Vendor for Successful Speech Analytics Implementation:

Dealing with experts is always better instead of a newbie. An experienced vendor will assist you at each step of implementation. Look for a vendor with the best reviews and recommendations to choose the appropriate one. Many contact centers are already pleased by the services and benefits of Kwantics Speech Analytics. Our professionals specialized in serving contact centers. At Kwantics, we assist and advise our customers at every step of the process.

Choose Adaptable System:

Choose a flexible system and ensure the scalability and ease of system handling. Take the help of your vendor before and after installation of Speech Analytics to avoid further problems. Kwantics as a vendor believes in true customer satisfaction and gives 24/7 customer support.

 

 

Other Things to Keep in Mind for the Success of Speech Analytics of Call Center:

1. An orientation or a learning and development session of managers with vendors is important. Managers should be aware of how to use the system to their advantage like getting customer reports of agent performance.  

2. Experience the Speech Analytics solution for a month. If required, you can arrange a small training session of your agents on ‘How to use Speech Analytics?’.

3. Once you start using Speech Analytics for your call center, analyze its working and the results. Check whether the system can produce expected results or not. Note the feedback of call center agents about the working of the system.

With time and proper data fed to engines, the accuracy of Speech Analytics engines can be increased. Business management also needs to take care of some important points like correct preparations, implementation, and patience. With proper things in place, you will be surprised with the benefits of using Speech Analytics for your call center.

Don’t believe us? Give us a chance to demonstrate how AI-Powered Speech Analytics will be beneficial for your call centers. 

Book a live demo today.