Speech Analytics: The Ultimate Guide
speech analytics, analytics, iovox insights, conversational ai,
Speech analytics is the process of analyzing voice recordings or calls with speech recognition software to find valuable data and provide quality assurance.
With this technology, you unlock a gold mine of insights about customer satisfaction metrics, customer churn, agent performance, customer journey, customer support issues, and more!
But how does speech analytics work?
This post will cover all aspects of speech analytics, including eight essential factors to consider when selecting a suitable software solution.
Moreover, we will unveil a one-of-a-kind speech analytics solution that can skyrocket your overall business performance and provide four best implementation practices.
This Article Contains:
(Click on a link to skip to a specific section)
- What Is Speech Analytics?
- Why Is Speech Analytics Important?
- 8 Factors to Consider When Choosing a Speech Analytics Software
- The Best Speech Analytics Solution: iovox Insights
- 4 Best Practices for Implementing Speech Analytics
Let’s get started!
What Is Speech Analytics?
Speech analytics (also called interaction analytics) leverages automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to draw meaning from audio call recordings. It analyzes the collected data from spoken words for meaningful business intelligence.
It's important to note that speech and voice analytics are different.
Speech analytics analyzes spoken words, while voice analytics examines vocal patterns to understand emotions during conversations.
How Does Speech Analytics Work?
Here’s how speech analytics typically works:
Step 1: Data Processing
Speech analytics uses sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) and speech technologies to analyze spoken words and recorded call metadata, including:
- Automatic speech recognition
- Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- Machine Learning (ML)
- Tonality-based customer sentiment analysis
- Speech transcription (converting speech to text)
- Algorithms
Step 2: Analysis
After the call recordings are analyzed, speech analytics uses Natural Language Processing to categorize, spot keywords, redact (for compliance intents), and report its call analysis.
Step 3: Delivering Valuable Insight
Next, the speech analytics software or platform delivers detailed reporting on the analysis, including:
- Call quality
- Customer sentiment
- Agent performance
- Compliance monitoring
- Self-service options
Which Businesses Can Benefit From Speech Analytics?
Almost any business dealing with customer interaction over calls can benefit from speech analytics — be it automotive, real estate, healthcare, or retail.
Healthcare and financial services can benefit immensely since they have regulatory compliance needs regarding storing and retrieving customer data.
Moreover, they also need the earliest indication of customer data or compliance violations — a job that speech analytics solutions do best.
Let's find out what makes speech analytics such a game-changer.
Why Is Speech Analytics Important?
Speech analytics greatly enhances quality assurance and customer satisfaction in 2023 — transforming customer interaction and other functions in industries with high call volumes.
Here are some use cases highlighting the benefits of speech analytics:
Take Action on Customer Calls
Speech analytics can automatically unfurl key customer insights and spot trends across all customer calls. This allows rapid workforce optimization that can improve employee performance and customer experiences through data-driven insights.
For example, iovox Insights offers speech analytics that provides actionable insights and the ability to spot trends and forecast outcomes.
All you need to do is define the keywords and trends to track, and the conversational AI will highlight conversations or customer calls that match your criteria. Iovox will also send out alerts based on what’s important for you and your business.
Improve Employee Performance
It’s hard to review every recorded call for quality management manually.
But with speech analytics and conversational intelligence tools like iovox Insights, you can increase your sample rates easily to review performance.
You can also use AI to spot larger trends and KPIs across your team that impact or optimize agent performance, marketing initiatives, and customer experience.
Here are more ways you can use iovox Insights to improve your call center and contact center performance:
- iovox uses Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) to record and transcribe the spoken words of contact center agents and callers. Use the speech transcription to review if every agent is sticking to their script or to train new hires.
- Access the iovox Insights dashboard to view real-time customer insights on call duration, answered calls, missed calls, etc., to spot areas of improvement. The analytics will help you deliver tailored feedback to agents or sales reps.
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Evaluating your phone calls is crucial to improving customer satisfaction (meeting customer needs).
With speech analytics technology, you can recognize issues trending across customer calls — that you may not have considered a serious problem or missed altogether.
Moreover, you can assess whether your strategies make an impact by monitoring customer sentiment in your calls post-implementation.
This is made easy with iovox Insight’s keyword spotting feature.
It lets you feed the AI keywords or phrases like “good service,” “sale,” “cash buyer,” “cancel,” and “sign up,” etc., to track positive customer sentiment.
This will eventually help you reduce customer churn, increase customer retention, and improve the customer journey.
That said, examining specific factors when choosing a speech analytics solution can help maximize its benefits.
Let’s take a look.
8 Factors to Consider When Choosing a Speech Analytics Software
Here are eight essential factors to remember when selecting a speech analytics solution:
Accuracy and Performance
The software should have high accuracy in transcribing and analyzing speech.
Look for solutions with advanced speech recognition capabilities that can handle different accents, languages, and speech patterns.
Analysis Capabilities
Your speech analytics tool should offer advanced speech analysis tools like sentiment analysis, emotion detection, keyword spotting, and trend identification.
These features can help uncover specific aspects of your product or service that resonate positively with customers as well as areas where improvement is needed.
By utilizing software equipped with sentiment analysis capabilities, you can swiftly determine your Net Promoter Score (NPS), a crucial metric for gauging customer loyalty.
Simply create a list of keywords or phrases to assess customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction levels, and then employ it to analyze all your survey calls.
Data Integration and Compatibility
If you need to expand your contact center operations from 5 to 50 sales reps, your speech analytics tool must be capable of adapting seamlessly.
This can minimize the costs of transitioning to new systems or implementing additional software solutions.
Additionally, ensure it can easily integrate with your current systems, such as your customer relationship management (CRM) software or omnichannel contact center platform.
Customization and Flexibility
Optimal effectiveness is achieved when speech analytics solutions seamlessly align with your specific business processes and workflows.
For instance, see if the software matches your unique steps, stages, or approvals in a particular process.
User Interface and Ease of Use
A user-friendly interface allows new agents to understand how to perform tasks and access features quickly.
Your software must provide comprehensive help resources, including documentation, tutorials, and context-sensitive help.
Data Security and Compliance
Ensure the software has robust data security and compliance with relevant regulations, such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) or HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act).
Vendor Reputation and Support
Opt for vendors that offer reliable and timely support channels, such as phone, email, or live chat. Also, remember to evaluate their support hours, response times, and the expertise of their support staff.
Lastly, look for established vendors with a positive track record and a history of delivering reliable, high-quality software solutions.
Cost and Return on Investment (ROI)
Estimate the total cost of the software solution, including upfront or ongoing costs and costs related to implementation, customization, training, or integration.
This will help you make informed decisions that align with your organization's budget, objectives, and long-term strategy.
Additionally, compare the anticipated financial benefits against the total cost of ownership. This can help you understand the financial viability of the investment and determine the payback period.
Looking for a speech analytics solution that fits all these criteria?
Introducing: iovox Insights!
The Best Speech Analytics Solution: iovox Insights
The fastest and most efficient method to benefit from speech analytics is to opt for a conversational AI solution like iovox Insights.
iovox Insights uses conversational intelligence to transcribe recorded conversations and draw key customer interaction analytics.
The AI also lets you pull actionable insights from recorded customer calls to analyze them further for quality and workforce management.
Here are some impressive things iovox Insights’ can do for you using speech and text analytics:
Track Customer Calls with Keywords
iovox’s keyword spotting feature lets you automatically track specific phrases and keywords to the AI to detect them from recorded calls. The AI monitors them to uncover keywords that help:
- Boost customer satisfaction and customer experience
- Improve customer retention
- Build trust and better customer relationships
- Influence a sale
- Establish mutual success (for both customer and agent)
- Influence customer decisions
- Know what’s happening on inbound leads
- Know the quality of leads being delivered
- Know how agent teams are handling incoming inquiries
- Spot trends and outcomes
- Find revenue through complimentary services
- Gain a business understanding that was unreachable before
iovox Insights also highlights each customer conversation or key phrase matching your business criteria and triggers alerts to let you know ASAP. This will help you achieve extraordinary results for your customer service or customer support team.
Make Every Customer Conversation Searchable
Easily read through and search for any customer conversation with recorded and transcribed calls. These abilities let you promote transparency within the company and make it easy to refer to important call logs.
Even better, the extracted call data can also be a white paper or study material for analysis. You can use it to help any new agent understand what a typical customer service call looks like.
Evaluate KPIs to Improve Customer Experience
iovox Insights can track and spot trends as well as forecast outcomes based on call interaction standards important to you.
To get a deep insight into all the details defying your call standards, view the iovox dashboard. Here you’ll see valuable data to improve your operational efficiency, including:
- Total conversation time
- Average calls per day
- Average handle time (AHT)
- Preferred keywords detected in customer conversations
- Call outcomes
- Call volumes and more
Moreover, with time, as conversational AI is exposed to more and more customer interactions, you'll find more ways to train Artificial Intelligence.
This way, iovox Insights continues to evolve into a powerful tool to serve you best.
Even with the best speech analytics tool to back you up, transitioning to the new AI technology can be tricky.
To navigate this change, explore some best practices that ensure your business' success.
4 Best Practices for Implementing Speech Analytics
Let's explore some industry best practices that can help pave the way for seamless and impactful integration of speech analytics into your business operations:
Clearly Define Objectives
Define concrete and specific goals.
Instead of a generic goal like ‘improve customer satisfaction,’ specify a measurable target, such as ‘increase customer satisfaction ratings by 10% within six months.’
Set a realistic timeline for achieving your objectives. Ideally, define short-term and long-term goals to guide your implementation strategy and measure progress.
Integrate with Existing Systems
When you integrate speech analytics with your CRM system, it links speech data to customer profiles.
This can help you quickly identify the root cause of customer dissatisfaction and distinct customer segments for targeted marketing.
For example, a real estate company can combine speech analysis and CRM data to create a segment for first-time homebuyers.
Once segmented, you can create targeted marketing campaigns with information like tips for navigating the home-buying process or showcasing affordable starter homes.
Train and Educate Employees
Not everyone will know how to use speech analytics from the get-go, so it’s crucial to tailor the training to your employee’s specific needs and roles.
Offer hands-on training sessions that dive into the intricacies of speech and text analytics software, such as data collection, transcription, speech recognition, search queries, and visualization.
These sessions can enhance their proficiency in utilizing speech analytics effectively.
Monitor and Evaluate Performance
By tracking KPIs related to customer satisfaction, you can assess the impact of speech analytics on improving customer experiences.
For example, sustained use of speech analytics software could improve your agents’ response time and resolution rate. This, in turn, will positively impact your customer's satisfaction.
In the long run, you should be able to measure the exact ROI that speech analytics brings to your business.
Final Thoughts
The speech analytics market has had a massive impact on improving customer experience and compliance for several industries.
It’s time that you, too, get on board with speech analytics to keep up with your competitors.
And lucky for you, we’ve just the speech analytic tool: iovox Insights.
Start using iovox Insights today to find unending development and call quality enriching opportunities with every customer interaction!
To connect, simply click the call button below, and we’ll be in touch with you shortly.
You can also email us at hello@iovox.com or give us a call toll-free from within the US at +1 888 369 9519.
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