Voice Analytics Vs Speech Analytics: 3 Key Differences

voice analytics, speech analytics, conversational ai, customer service, 

Voice and speech analytics are all the hype amongst customer-facing companies today!

Businesses use these technologies to improve agent performance, boost sales, optimize customer engagement, decrease customer churn, and more!

Chances are that you, too, have similar goals for your business and are thinking of employing speech or voice analytics.

But how are they different, and which solution should you go for?

Let’s find out!

In this article, we’ll do thorough voice analytics vs speech analytics comparison and help you understand why you should opt for speech analytics. We’ll also answer some FAQs for better understanding.

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Voice Analytics Vs Speech Analytics: Top Differences

Speech analytics and voice analytics are often used interchangeably, and they may have similar features too. But these systems perform very different tasks.

Here are the top differences between the two:

  1. Definition

    Let’s start by defining them.

    1. Speech Analytics

      A speech analytics solution focuses on the actual words mentioned in a recorded phone call or customer conversation.

      This conversational intelligence technology analyzes the content of customer interactions with an agent by converting speech into text — to organize the content.

      Speech analytics software are powerful enough to improve operational performance by:

      • Gathering information and key business intelligence
      • Identifying patterns
      • Segmenting commonly used phrases and terms
      • Collecting customer insights

      This allows you to search every customer interaction for specific keywords (of your choice). Spotting calls containing those keywords can enhance quality management as QA managers can see how each agent handles customer calls related to certain topics.

      Check out our ultimate guide to speech analytics to learn more about the technology.

    2. Voice Analytics

      On the other hand, voice analytics pays attention to how the words were said in a customer phone call or voice recording.

      Voice analytics software can analyze audio patterns in a voice recording for certain features like:

      • Tone
      • Pitch
      • Stress
      • Tempo
      • And rhythm

      Voice analytics reveals the emotions in a call’s content via sentiment analysis. That’s why voice analytics is often known as sentiment analysis. It can easily and accurately gauge a customer’s mood.

      Moreover, some voice analytics software use speech-to-text or transcription technology to automatically piece together a full conversation and spot common as well as trending topics.

  2. Uses

    Since speech and voice analytics have different intentions, they can be used for different purposes:

    1. Speech Analytics

      Let’s say, a customer calls to enquire about their order’s shipment status and delivery date. Speech analytics software can quickly spot the words “order,” “shipped,” and “expected delivery” in every phone call containing those keywords.

      Call center and contact center managers can then dig into each phone call to check if customers are receiving what they need — enhancing customer satisfaction.

      Here are some more use cases of speech analytics:

      • Businesses use speech analytics to gain insight into customer needs and customer experience, as well as discover customer sentiment trends.
      • Companies in different industries use speech analytics data to:
        • Make more informed decisions
        • Improve agent performance
        • Provide top-notch customer experience
      • An advanced speech analytics solution can have scorecards to help managers initiate a healthy and competitive training environment as well as provide consistent feedback to agents.

    2. Voice Analytics

      Voice analytics is extensively used to improve customer experience.

      For instance, a customer may say “awesome,” which normally indicates positive sentiment. But it can often be used in a sarcastic tone.

      That’s why understanding customer emotions is necessary to create a better customer experience — which, in turn, helps increase customer retention and customer loyalty.

      Fortunately, modern voice analytics solutions include features that provide context.

      Here are some more uses:

      • Voice analytics can detect not only customer sentiment but also agent sentiment. This keeps them in check, helping you meet regulatory compliance.
      • In case of a demand for new products and services, voice analytics can monitor and analyze customer perspectives using speech, sentiment, and tone analysis — helping you find new product ideas.

  3. Benefits

    Using speech and voice analytics has its own share of benefits.

    1. Speech Analytics

      Here are some impressive speech analytics advantages:

      • Safety and Quality Assurance:

        It can be quite difficult to monitor all calls, but not with a speech analytics tool. It allows you to monitor 100% of agent conversations in real-time to understand your customer journey fully. This motivates agents to stick to authorized scripts or phrases — achieving regulatory compliance.

        Real-time speech analytics also ensures quality security as it monitors when an agent requests personal data or makes unnecessary demands. This can be alerted to the managers for review.

        As a result, safety and quality assurance become convenient in industries dealing with sensitive information, like banking, financial services, insurance, and healthcare.

      • Improve Agent Coaching:

        Since a speech analytics tool allows you to track all calls, it empowers managers. It does so by identifying coaching opportunities and highlighting examples of ideal agent-customer interaction calls.

        Since speech analytics monitors calls in real-time, it allows a company to offer real-time feedback to their agents — enabling continuous improvement in every call.

        Speech analytics can also ensure agents avoid language that can hamper customer satisfaction and ensure a consistent experience. This way, regardless of who’s taking the call, it provides a positive brand experience through and through.

      • Reduce Customer Effort:

        Post call speech analytics lets a company discover areas of high customer effort and plan actions needed to optimize customer engagement and increase satisfaction.

        For example, if customers contact agents because they can’t complete a particular task on the website or app, speech analytics can inform you about this situation. You can use this insight to:

        • Improve self-service functionality (helps avoid escalation to more expensive human agents)
        • Enhance customer satisfaction
        • Drive efficiencies for the organization

        All these efforts will finally result in improved customer feedback and better customer retention.

      • Enhance Agent Experience:

        Customer service agents have their plates full of multiple tasks like documenting call details, accessing and sharing appropriate information, etc. They do it all while listening closely to the customer.

        As a result, agents may struggle and fail to give customers the attention they need.

        Speech analytics reduces the burden on agents by automating tasks like:

        • Data entry
        • Accessing customer needs insights
        • Suggesting knowledge-based information
        • Prompting the next best actions in real-time.

        This way, speech analytics not only streamlines agent experience but also improves agent satisfaction, speeds agent ramp-up times, and drives agent retention. It also frees up agents’ time to tackle larger call volumes.

    2. Voice Analytics

      Voice analytics can improve customer service and call center agent performance levels by automatically identifying the following insights:

      • Customer satisfaction:

        Voice analytics software can easily spot recurring themes, trends, and hot topics that can point you towards customer satisfaction levels.

      • Identifying Underperforming agents:

        Voice analysis can help you identify underperforming agents on your customer service team and figure out how to fix the issue.

        Turn poor performers into good ones by identifying messaging and conversation techniques that bring results and produce high customer satisfaction.

So, which one should you go for?

While voice analytics certainly has a big role to play, most businesses would directly benefit more from speech analytics today.

Here’s why:

Why Choose Speech Analytics for Your Business

As intimidating as it may sound, speech analytics is quite easy to deploy in your company, especially if you’ve got the right speech analytics solution by your side, like iovox Insights.

iovox Insights is the ultimate conversational analytics solution that lets you transcribe recorded conversations to draw business and customer insights as well as spot trends.

Here are some of the things iovox’s speech analytics can do for you:

  1. Make Customer Conversation Searchable

    iovox’s speech analytics record and transcribe calls, so you can easily read through and search every prior customer interaction, just like text or email. The searchability makes important information accessible and increases transparency across all your customer interactions.

    The transcripts can also double as scripts for new agents. Trainers can use them as coaching material.

  2. Monitor Calls with Keywords

    Iovox’s conversation intelligence has a powerful keyword spotter feature that lets you feed the AI with specific phrases and keywords important to your business. The Artificial Intelligence automatically recognizes the keywords and phrases from call recordings and tracks them.

    This feature is perfect for when you want to discover what influences key decisions. Moreover, you can also add advanced criteria like a trigger or filter to train your AI and notify key people in your company of insights.

  3. Measure Performance Metrics to Improve CX

    Allow speech analytics to record your calls to track and spot KPIs as well as make outcome predictions based on criteria you deem important.

    Monitor your call’s KPIs on the iovox dashboard that includes actionable insights like average calls per day, total talk time, and your preferred keywords spotted in conversations.

    All of these data points can help you improve customer experience, as well as enhance agent performance.

    And that’s not it. Over time, the conversational AI will discover more opportunities to train the Artificial Intelligence as it monitors more and more customer voice calls.

    This means you can compile what you learned in the past and present, multiplying your chances of success, boosting sales, and increasing customer loyalty.

Still have some questions? Let’s answer some FAQs!

2 FAQs About Analytics Technologies

Here are some FAQs to further clarify speech analysis and other analytics technologies:

  1. What is Text Analytics?

    Text analytics (TA) is a machine learning technique that enables businesses to use written content for making crucial decisions. It’s used to extract valuable insight from unstructured text data automatically with the help of a variety of techniques such as:

    • Sentiment analysis
    • Topic modeling
    • Named entity recognition
    • Term frequency
    • And event extraction

  2. What is Automatic Speech Recognition?

    Automatic speech recognition (ASR) or speech-to-text is a machine’s ability to identify spoken words and convert them into readable text.

    Simple speech recognition software may typically have a limited vocabulary and only identify words when spoken clearly. However, more sophisticated speech recognition software can handle natural speech, accents, and different languages.

Final Thoughts

It’s easy to confuse voice and speech analytics, given the nuanced differences that make them unique.

But the most important thing to remember is that these automation solutions have numerous benefits that grow your business and improve processes — while saving time and money.

So, whether you handle a big contact center or a local franchise, you will benefit and profit from adopting an automated monitoring solution like speech analytics.

Speaking of which, we’ve found the perfect solution for your business: iovox Insights!

Start using iovox Insights today to access the easiest, most powerful speech analytics solution that will grow your business and enhance every customer interaction!

To connect, simply click the call button below, and we’ll be in touch with you shortly.

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