Speech analytics is a tool that allows you to analyze the contents of a call, enabling you to monitor and improve agent performance and customer satisfaction.
With only around 11% of businesses currently using speech analytics capabilities, a large percentage of businesses have not taken the opportunity to implement a technology that can play an important role in optimizing contact center and sales operations.
For those that have already implemented speech analytics, or for those considering it, here are 10 best practices to help you get the most out of the technology.
10 Best Practices to Get the Most Out of Speech Analytics
Speech analytics best practices
1. Monitor and score every call
Speech analytics tools allow you to monitor and score 100% of calls regardless of agent location. By analyzing every call, your business can make data-driven decisions to inform agent operations, sales processes and more. You can monitor the quality of the calls and assess how agents interact with customers. You can then set standards to improve contact center KPIs, such as reducing handle time and increasing customer satisfaction.
2. Set keywords and phrases to recognize customer sentiment
Tag keywords and phrases to help you track and identify when a customer is satisfied or dissatisfied with an interaction. By tagging words like “frustrating” or “problem with X channel”, you are able to identify common pain points, and make the relevant improvements. It is also valuable to understand when and why customers are satisfied. Based on those findings, you can try to replicate those experiences to create better interactions for all customers.
3. Create structured data points from speech to inform your operations
Speech analytics allows you to automatically create structured data points from free form speech to inform operations and determine how to best communicate with customers. These data points can then be used by different parts of the business to understand product or service issues and advise changes in processes across the company.
4. Utilize speech analytics for training and quality management
On average 98% of contact center interactions go unmonitored or unreviewed. You can use speech analytics to transcribe and score 100% of calls to increase your ability to screen for quality and compliance, giving you an unbiased and holistic understanding of performance. Through these insights, you can learn where agents may be falling short or where they’re excelling. Contact center managers can pinpoint the challenges and use the successful interactions to train and improve execution. Speech analytics can help inform training strategies to ensure consistent quality across all customer calls.
5. Use the data to engage agents
In addition to utilizing the insights for training and quality, you can use the data to better engage your employees. What’s the difference? Engaging your employees is more about providing them with the opportunities to grow professionally, execute consistently, and feel empowered in their work.
Speech analytics overcomes employees’ concerns about an unfair evaluation process by automatically scoring 100% of conversations that provide objective feedback. The information is made available immediately and allows the agents to feel like they’ll be evaluated fairly and consistently. This consistency can give agents the confidence that good work will be recognized and rewarded.
6. Manage performance in real time
Speech analytics tools allow you to analyze your agents’ performance in real time. Our SpeechIQ tool, for example, has automatic and customizable agent scorecards. These scorecards give you the ability to understand how your entire team is dealing with the delivery of key business requirements like legal statements, policy adherence, and on-brand communication standards. If things aren’t going well, you can get notified promptly and handle accordingly.
7. Recognize sales leads
You can use the data provided by speech analytics to inform upsell and cross-sell opportunities with your sales team. Speech analytics can also be used to gather customers’ suggestions, which can be shared to make product or service improvements or influence marketing campaigns to drive sales leads.
8. Reduce agent effort on tedious stuff
Speech analytics reduces the post-call effort normally required of human agents. The accurate speech transcription not only minimizes post-call work, but is often more accurate. You can also free up your quality managers’ time to be more strategic. They’ll be able to manually review the most important or high-risk calls and provide targeted coaching to agents.
9. Manage compliance
By monitoring, analyzing, and scoring 100% of interactions in your contact center, you can be promptly notified of regulatory risk and take action. You can also have sensitive data automatically redacted by the AI technology.
Utilize the scorecards mentioned above to track compliance keywords to ensure agents are speaking about these sensitive topics appropriately.
You can also use the call recordings to capture consent.
10. Unlock potential across your teams with data-driven processes
With speech analytics reporting tools you can understand and address broader customer and agent experience trends in your business. Reduce risk, empower your agents, and scale your business with the insights provided by a speech analytics tool.
