What Every Call Center Needs To Know About Speech Analytics

Customer Inter@ction Solutions,  Jun 2007  by Barnard, Patrick

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Speech analytics is one of the fastest growing market segments in the call center industry. Thanks to major advancements in the algorithms used to interpret speech, these automated systems now enable organizations to "mine" their recorded calls to learn details about both their customers and their agents.

Unlike the speech analytics solutions of a few years ago, which were mainly used to perform simple "word spotting" in recorded conversations, todays solutions can identify the context of what is being said, giving organizations the ability to more accurately categorize calls and gain new insights into customer and agent behavior. In fact, these systems can now actually detect emotions, giving organizations a powerful new way to gauge calls while they are in progress.

Todays speech analytics solutions have uses beyond just improving agent performance. It can be argued that they now have greater value outside of the contact center than inside. That's mainly because today's solutions are capable of mining all of the call data, as opposed to just a small percentage of it, which enables organizations to see a more accurate view of the "big picture." As a result, speech analytics are increasingly being used by executives in sales, marketing and operations to increase revenue, reduce costs, increase customer retention and improve the overall performance of the call center. As organizations come to adopt these solutions, the role of the call center is being redefined into that of a "business intelligence center" - the central hub of intelligence for the organization.

Once the province of large enterprises only, speech analytics are increasingly starting to travel downstream in terms of the size of the organizations that can benefit from it. "Interaction analytics can help any size of a contact center," said Barak Eilam, vice president and general manager, interaction analytics, at NICE. "Obviously, large centers face greater management challenges and as such can benefit from the technology significantly. However, we have also been working with small call centers that are experiencing fast-paced growth. Implanting interaction analytics early in the development cycle of such centers helps them to improve significandy the management of such rapid growth and to meet the associated challenges. Any contact center with more than 50 seats can benefit from the technology and see a very good ROI."

Don't Confuse It With IVR Technology

There is a misconception diat speech analytics solutions have to be as accurate as IVR solutions, in terms of speech recognition, to be of real value. The erroneous conclusion is that because today's speechenabled IVR systems are not entirely accurate that, similarly, speech analytics aren't entirely accurate either. It's important to consider that IVR is an application that comes into play at the front end of an interaction, whereas speech analytics are applied during and after the call.

"When people hear the word speech,' they tend to think speech recognition - diey think of IVR and desktop dictation systems, which speech analytics is not," said Jeff Gallino, president and CEO of CallMiner, a speech analytics company. "Even with speech recognition systems, diey have ridiculously high accuracy, and people still aren't satisfied with diem. That's because it is a transactional based accuracy problem they're interested in the accuracy at the moment, not 'is it accurate enough that I can run my business on die results?' When we talk about speech analytics, we talk about the 'business accuracy' - how accurate is it to run your business - and diat's a major distinction."

Dan Bodner, CEO and president of Verint, said, "It's not about trying to measure people's responses accurately, it's about being able to analyze overall trends and getting the big picture - but getting the big picture in an accurate way. Customers using our solutions are finding that the accuracy in terms of categorization is very good now - we're about 90 percent accurate - depending on the type of issue and the type of company. That's enough to really drive insight. You have to realize that even incomplete information is better than no information. If you have no idea why people are leaving and you can find five reasons why that's happening, you can do something about it."

Not Just A Call Center Application

In addition to improving traditional efficiency metrics such as first-call resolution, script compliance, agent performance and cross-sell/upsell rates, companies can also gain valuable insights into what their customers want by mining the data retrieved from their recorded calls.

"The great value of speech analytics is that it opens up near limitless opportunities to gain a better understanding of the customer intent or attitude," said Roger Woolley, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Autonomy/etalk. "At the most basic level, speech analytics simplifies access to recorded calls so that the call center can quickly, and without manual resources, find specific conversations, types of conversations or conversation trends for use in identifying at-risk customers, agent issues, training opportunities or process improvement initiatives. By providing an easy approach to finding relevant calls, speech analytics helps to bridge the gap between the call center and the rest of the organization so that the entire organization can analyze customer interactions for valuable insight into buying behaviors, product and competitive issues, as well as trends, opportunities and risks."