Speech analytics offers immense potential for improving interactions in real-time and delivering better customer experiences. It converts unstructured speech data into structured, classifiable information. This lets you find keywords, detect sentiment, understand tonality, identify awkward silences, and predict customer expectations from every call.
According to research, 80% of companies are actively using speech technology at their contact centres in 2021. At the same time, nearly 2 in 3 companies feel they are under-utilising their audio, and that current speech analytics implementations are mostly limited to transcription and data storage. It is vital that you not only extract customer insights from speech analytics, but you turn them into real-world action that can meaningfully improve your KPIs.
Here are 5 strategies for making this happen.
1. Explore real-time insights generation
Historical analysis can be helpful when identifying long term trends, cohort averages, and more overarching business insights. But you need real-time insight generation to bring about immediate and urgent improvements in call quality. For example, checking for a specific keyword in the first five minutes of every call can help improve script adherence at your contact centre. Combine speech analytics with real-time mobile updates and modifications to keep supervisors in the loop.
2. Discover customer intent in every call
True customer intent can be difficult to gauge, as different individuals may buy the same product for very different reasons and use cases. This is where speech analytics comes in. By screening call records for keywords like “I want,” you can identify the drivers for each customer persona, demographic group, and profile type. This will enrich your customer understanding and also inform your future cross-selling/up-selling strategies.
3. Detect flight risk and prevent churn
This is among the most important use cases for speech analytics in a contact centre. There are subtle signs that a customer might be open to switching brands, such as frequent mentions of a competitor, or a consistently frustrated tone across several interactions. Whenever your speech analytics report suggests the possibility of churn, the sales & marketing team can step in to initiate a re-engagement campaign. After all, the costs of converting a new customer will always be higher than retaining an old one, which is why speech analytics can reduce your overall customer acquisition costs.
4. Use speech analytics reports to train agents
One of the key customer insights you will get from speech analytics is an accurate and contextualised CSAT score. Customers can not only share a quantifiable score out of 5 or 10, but they can also quickly detail their reasons for the same. Incorporate this feedback when training agents, particularly for voice training and product education. Speech analytics can also serve as a helpful KPI for monitoring agent improvement, as newly trained agents should achieve a higher CSAT and should no longer receive the same negative feedback.
5. Leverage analytics data to improve culture
Finally, speech analytics can give you objective performance indicators to help finetune contact centre culture. A high CSAT can garner real-time recognition, issues around stress or overworking can be addressed through time off, and agents can be trained to prioritise customer sentiment as part of their ethos.
