Speech Analytics: Shaping the Call Center Landscape

Our industry’s information collection and metrics technology has come far in recent years, with speech analytics now providing a wealth of data to guide individual operators in their customer interactions, aide management teams in their real-time decisions on the floor, and inform organizations as they redefine industry standards for customer experience (CX).

Call Transcription: The Early Days

Upon its introduction, speech-to-text capabilities and electronic call transcription had a significant impact on our industry.

Computers could now take the place of people manually transcribing call recordings in shorthand and typing the notes into document form, reducing both labor costs and human error.

The resulting transcriptions could be carefully reviewed and analyzed, allowing supervisory personnel to identify business problems and make evidence-based decisions intended to improve service. Here are a few examples:

• Improvements to call scripts
• Additional team training for broader changes
• Coaching of individual operators to resolve specific performance issues

Electronic call transcription was progress, but it was still severely limited due to the speed of human analysis.

However, it was just the warm-up act for speech analytics — an entirely new field of data gathering and analysis that would provide more insight than was previously thought possible.

Speech Analytics: The Next Frontier

In its infancy, speech analytics was referred to as call mining, where the electronically transcribed call text was scanned for specific instances of a keyword or keyphrase — a still-rudimentary form of performance analysis.

As industry technology progressed, the capabilities of electronic speech analytics increased in both range and detail. Those newer capabilities include:

• Automated checking of operator adherence to call scripting and use of designated key phrases
• Classifying the reason for the call
• Identifying specific products or options mentioned by both operator and customer
• Measuring the frequency and duration of dead air, including extended gaps of silence or poor reception
• Evaluation of the customer’s emotions at any point during the call through analysis of the tone and stress in a customer’s voice
• Automatic redaction of sensitive information, such as credit card information or social security numbers

These advances enable the extraction of critical information from customer interactions, identifying patterns in both customer responses and operator reactions.

Speech Analytics: The Benefits

As technology has progressed, these metrics and feedback have become available instantaneously.

Real-time feedback sent directly to the operator and supervisory staff allows operators to make decisions and corrections based on unbiased information to improve the services they are providing — while the call is still going on and the outcome undecided.

In short, these capabilities (and many others not mentioned) allow call centers to:

• Provide a better customer experience (CX)
• Raise the level of services
• Increase efficiency
• Become more profitable

All of this is made possible by mining crucial information from customer interactions through the use of speech analytics technology.

Progressing Technology: Moving Into the Future

There’s no indication that the tide of technological advancements providing increasingly detailed, actionable data will stop, or even slow in the near future.

The continuation, or even acceleration, of this trend is evidenced by new technologies constantly being developed and refined, including enhanced emotional analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), advances that will continue to guide call centers in their allocation of resources to create better customer experiences and improve overall performance.

Contact the Call Center Specialists at JBHworks

If you’re interested in learning how speech analytics, custom reporting, call scoring, or the many other custom enhancements to your call center technology can improve individual agent and overall call center performance in your business’s specific context, contact the specialists at JBHworks.

Click here to schedule a demonstration.