The Evolution of Speech Analytics and its Impact on the Customer Experience

Speech analytics has come a long way since it’s initial development stages. It is now able to quickly, easily and accurately recognise spoken words and phrases to gather information from calls between agents and customers through the use of a speech analytics tool. This provides aid to managers, sales teams and other staff to help track efficiency, productivity and customer satisfaction levels.

How Does Speech Analytics Work?

Speech analytics uses speech recognition while capturing calls and turns this into data in one of three ways: the phonetic approach, LVCSR or direct phrase recognition.

The first, the phonetic approach operates with something called phonemes, a very distinctive sound, to pinpoint words. It is incredibly speedy when processing but is also not the most accurate method.

LVCSR uses a similar technique to the above and is then run through a dictionary to generate a transcript,with the use of statistical analysis to always make sure sentences are correct and comprehensible. This method does come with its issues, as it is slower and also brings the challenge of customers using words that may not be in the dictionary, such as slang or product names.

Direct phase recognition is built to understand and detect pre-determined phrases. It is the most reliable technique as it is not analysing and translating full conversations, instead, it seeks these words and phrases out alone.

Speech Analytics Software Evolution

Back in 1952, the Audrey System came to life. This revolutionary software would detect pauses in-between data with high accuracy in a similar manner to a person’s voice.

The ‘80s and ‘90s saw a rise in home computers and rudimentary microphones were able to pick up a user’s speech and recognise basic commands.

Siri was thought of as one of the most revolutionary inventions of speech recognition, with a seemingly infinite vocabulary, understanding of even the most complex language and had some of the most advanced AI the public had ever seen.

Now, speech analytics solutions are a common piece of software in most households, such as Google smart speakers and Amazon’s Alexa.

Call Centre Speech Analytics Applications

Call centres are reaping the benefits to improve customer service levels while also easing pressure on agents in the following ways:

Reducing Average Handling Time

A common complaint of customers is how long it takes for their call to be resolved. Speech analytics software can detect the reason for a call and put the customer through to the right department or person first time, ensuring they are receiving the best advice.

This then reduces the need for agents to be passing callers through to different people, freeing the phone lines for other callers and reducing hold times.

Training

When training new agents, they are often required to listen to real phone calls from previous interactions. These examples can quickly become outdated in such a fast-paced world and even irrelevant to current practices and procedures.

Before speech analytics, managers were faced with the arduous task of trying to find new training examples, random sampling can only be effective if that right call is found by chance and manually listening to every phone call simply isn’t viable due to the time it takes.

Speech analytics can group phone calls into certain groups and allow managers to find these calls within a fraction of the time.

Prevents Customer Churn

With the information provided by speech analytics, agents can determine the best course of action for their call.

Real-time analysis of keywords and phrases used can provide a platform for agents to pull up the correct information needed to relay to a customer in seconds. This prevents customers from being given incorrect data and improves loyalty to the brand.

Aids Compliance

Agents are always at risk of straying from compliance rules and regulations, especially if they are new to the role or industry.

Speech analytics can pinpoint words and phrases used that relate to these matters and provide a prompt for the right information. It can also be utilised with historical phone calls, managers can see if a conversation was not compliant and rectify this as soon as possible with a customer to avoid potential fine or negative PR.

Managers can then provide the right training to these agents to prevent the same error from happening again. Without this, an agent could continue to follow the wrong practices for long periods and it won’t be alerted to senior staff until it is too late.

Uses speech analytics, managers, agents and any other staff involved in the process can see results quickly. As every call is monitored, there is no risk of anything slipping the net.

All information is analysed and can be used to create a more efficient, compliant and productive call centre and can even reduce overall costs.