The total market for speech analytics is expected to reach $1.33 billion internationally by 2019. Companies around the world are realizing that they need the hidden insights that can only come from human recordings. It is only natural that being able to analyze a wider range of speech would give a company more insight.
Expanding the adoption of speech analytics has implications for quality assurance, customer care, and internal analytics, among many other business functions. Here are just a few of the advantages of investing in speech analytics software while it is still a relative novelty in the modern business landscape.
Big Data Can Become Bigger Data With Speech Analytics.
Each year, there are more than 270 billion customer care calls around the world. Are you taking full advantage of these communications as a source of data? The right call quality monitoring enables you to learn about the needs of your customers long after they hang up the phone with your representatives.
Part of your contact center quality monitoring procedures might include changing your customer service script to include more probing questions meant to elicit deeper customer demographic information about their state of mind, along with the reason for the call and an assessment of the success of the call.
Speech Analysis Makes Customer Service Profitable.
For many small companies, customer service representatives are also sales representatives. In a sales room like this, every second that a person spends on a customer service call has an economic cost. However, making each call an opportunity for analysis keeps the profit train rolling, even as you attempt to hold the customers that you already have. A good speech analytics solution will catch more of the information that would otherwise just get lost in the digital records of your phone network.
A full 90 percent of customers still prefer to call companies rather than use email, social media, or online chats. This is simply too much information to miss, especially if your sales agents are trained to extract useful information during calls.
Speech Analytics Technology Can Help Train Your Call Center Agents.
There is even more information to gain from customer service calls, and that information centers around your employees. A well-trained call center or sales agent means the difference between a customer who chooses loyalty or churn. The right speech analytics software lets you check sales interactions with more immediacy. You can basically listen to every call that comes into the center. Not only can you pinpoint issues with individual sales agents, but you can also organize data to note trends, which might indicate a problem in your procedure rather than in your agents. This is an especially good failsafe against a bad customer service call finding its way online as a viral communication on social media.
Cloud-Based Speech Analytics Programs Can Help You Avoid Costly Litigation.
Your call center likely has compliance issues that take up more of management's time than you would like. If you can more quickly locate any relevant interaction within your records, you shorten the amount of time that you spend combing through records when a surprise audit comes up. In the case of litigation, you save money by shortening the discovery process.
You Can Base Nuanced Decisions on Speech Analytics.
The intangibles that you can pick up from natural conversations cannot be found in any survey, promotion, or focus group. The right tools for interpretation not only catch the words, but also help you form accurate customer attitude trends based on the accumulated, aggregated data.
Can you really get an accurate assessment of your customer care program and the attitudes of your customers based on a small sample of calls? You might be able to, but having the full census is always better than a sample. If only a negligible amount of calls relative to the total call population are monitored, and it takes extra manpower even to do that, you are spending too much money for too little of a return. Generate more data and more business with the right speech analytics program, automating the aggregation of your data and leaving no leak unplugged.
No matter the challenge that your business faces, speech analysis can help. Most call centers can trace every problem they have back to a lack of proper data. Relying on a sampling of calls provides an inadequate gauge of the current state of customer service, missed opportunities for upselling, the overuse of human resources, and even lower morale in the workplace. If you can back up your business decisions with hard data, not only does the sales floor become more precise, but the mistakes that are made from gut decisions are virtually eliminated.
Imagine never having to rely on unproven theories or what you thought someone said yesterday to make a decision today. This is the real advantage of implementing speech analytics today.
Jeanne Landau is director of marketing at CallFinder and 800 Response.