Speech Analytics (SA) was introduced to the call or contact center a decade or so ago. SA transcribes and analyzes audio in every phone call to discover powerful, rich actionable insights.

It has now reached a stage parallel to how other contact center technologies such as Quality Management (QM) and Workforce Management (WFM) are viewed as must-haves by contact centers. 

Among the multitude of factors that make SA a must have are:

• Despite the exponential growth of self-service and digital mediums of customer engagement such as chat and social media, the traditional phone call, or voice, continues to be the dominant mode of customer engagement.
• The latest generation of SA has taken giant strides in improving accuracy, speed and ease of use, and lowering the cost of ownership.
• SA can be flexibly deployed and used either on premises or in the cloud.

The business impact of SA for PSAP and contact center performance can be categorized into:

Cost Reduction: SA can help improve operational efficiency and reduce costs by detecting self-service issues and agent knowledge gaps, and reducing repeat calls, handle time, holds and transfers. 

Quality Management: SA helps evaluate a larger “statistically valid” sample of calls, eliminate human bias in selecting calls for evaluation, focus on high-value calls, and enable targeted agent coaching.

Sales Effectiveness: SA can compare successful to non-successful sales calls and agents, find the best words and phrases that lead to a sale, and identify words and phrases that are sales detractors. 

Compliance: SA can monitor 100% of interactions for agent script adherence and help reduce the risk of breaches, even if they’re very rare. It also allows organizations to show their internal processes and solutions to regulators.

In summary, Speech Analytics can have tremendous and broad positive impact in optimizing your customer engagement while helping day to day operations.