Speech Analytics Software

Introduction

Businesses often lack insights when it comes to understanding the problems their customers face. While post-purchase surveys and customer feedback forms try to fill this gap, they are somewhat ineffective as customers don’t always respond to such inquiries.

However, in today’s world, understanding what frustrates customers and what delights them has become easier. With innovations such as automatic speech recognition and speech analytics technology, customer service managers can now do much more than just listening in on calls their teams make/take. A speech analytics solution not only helps judge a caller’s emotional state but also the likelihood of them converting into a customer.

In this buyers guide, you’ll learn about the core features, key considerations, and other important aspects that will help you make an informed decision while choosing a speech analytics tool for your business.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• What is speech analytics software?
• Common features of speech analytics software
• What type of buyer are you?
• Benefits of speech analytics software
• Key considerations

What is speech analytics software?

Speech analytics software helps businesses analyze live and recorded calls between customers and customer support teams, which allows improving the customer journey and providing a better customer experience. The software gives businesses better customer insight into how to improve their sales and customer engagement practices.

The software offers sentiment analysis and pattern detection capabilities that enable customer success teams to identify recurring customer challenges and determine the best possible resolutions.

Common features of speech analytics software

Vendors offer various kinds of features with their software products but to make the best choice, you need an understanding of the common features that a speech analytics software tool must have.

What type of buyer are you?

The customer-facing role of any business makes investing in this technology necessary. Let’s have a look at the various types of buyers for speech analytics software.

• Businesses with large customer support teams: These buyers usually belong to industries such as ecommerce, travel, and tourism, and may handle a lot of face-time with customers. Speech analytics software can help them optimize their contact center through customer sentiment analysis and offer quicker customer resolutions and more effective customer servicing.
• Businesses with large sales teams: These buyers typically look for tools that help with sales gamification to enhance their sales processes. Managers can access call archives and view interactions to understand where their salespeople did well and which parts need improvement. By grading their calls and creating scorecards, this data can gamify and incentivize behavior. Predictive analytics is also used to identify cross-sell opportunities and educate and enhance salespeople to perform better.

Benefits of speech analytics software

Using speech analytics software can offer a lot of benefits to contact centers and users in customer-facing roles.

• Improves customer experience: Speech analytics tools analyze thousands of calls and gather a lot of insights about customer needs and wants. Additionally, the tool can detect whether a customer is upset or frustrated through emotional cues. With such data in their hands, contact centers can quickly determine how to best solve customer issues and increase customer satisfaction rates.
• Improves agent performance: When contact center agents speak with customers, speech analytics software can monitor these calls to evaluate agent performance and identify coaching opportunities. With the help of real-time monitoring, call center agents and customer support teams can be given instant feedback on areas that need improvement.
• Ensures compliance and identifies risks: Speech analytics can also be used to check whether service calls are following organizational compliance criteria. Using a speech analytics tool will result in a workforce that is familiar with protocols and required disclosures. This can be a crucial advantage in terms of quality assurance in highly regulated industries such as healthcare or finance.
• Increases cross-sell and up-sell opportunities: In both service-oriented and product-centric businesses, conversations can be monitored to find out which services or products are being mentioned the most by customers. This information can then be used to enhance sales conversion rates. Marketing teams can also take advantage of these insights to produce more effective marketing campaigns.

Key considerations

With a host of vendors in the speech analytics market, it is easy to get confused with choosing the right product. We suggest these key considerations before finalizing a speech analytics vendor to do business with.

• Data reliability: The primary factor that goes into choosing the right speech analytics software is the reliability of its data. Data reliability, in this case, would include the accuracy and completeness with which conversations are analyzed and stored.
• Sentiment analysis vs. voice recognition: A majority of buyers get confused between speech analytics and voice recognition technologies. The latter identifies audio and transcribes it into text while speech analytics goes beyond mere transcription and helps with emotion detection as well as call categorization based on keywords, caller intent, behavior, and customer needs, eliminating the need to evaluate calls manually.
• Deployment: Another important consideration before investing in speech analytics software is the deployment options a tool offers. In today’s remote work environment, a web-based or cloud-based service is preferred over on-premise deployment models.

Note: The application selected in this article is an example to show a feature in context and is not intended as an endorsement or recommendation. It has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.