In its incipient stages, the speech analytics market faced formidable growth barriers including low customer awareness and a lack of understanding about quantifiable ROI. But today, speech analytics is one of the fastest growing technologies in contact centers. In the past few years, the implementation of speech analytics has become commonplace, and in the future, we expect this trend to accelerate.

The Transformative Effect of Speech Analytics

But why is speech analytics growing so rapidly? One reason involves its powerful, enterprise-wide impact. Speech analytics identifies real business challenges and opportunities, delivers measurable benefits and improves the customer experience. Furthermore, this new technology delivers great value to multiple corporate departments including marketing, sales, product development and manufacturing. By using speech analytics, the marketing department, for example, can evaluate the success of a campaign while product management gains new ideas for product improvements.

High-volume contact centers must handle a vast quantity of unstructured data making it time-consuming and cost-intensive to extract relevant information. Speech analytics technologies, however, enable the automatic search for critical keywords within a huge mass of data, thus making previously hidden information accessible on a near real-time basis. The newly gained insights can be transformed into valuable business knowledge with company-wide impact. Corporate decision-makers can use informative voice data and interaction trends to facilitate customer services, streamline processes and reduce costs, thus boosting revenues in both their contact center and other business areas.

The growth of speech analytics can also be attributed to technical improvements of the technology itself. While the precision of speech analytics used to hover around 50 percent, today these systems actually offer an 80-to-90 percent matching accuracy. Moreover, the speed of the results has also increased significantly, enabling real-time information for company decision makers.

Speech analytics combined with emotion detection provides unique capabilities. Emotion detection is based on analytics of typical voice characteristics and is used for identifying calls, which contain specific acoustic signals, e.g. high volume. Combined with speech analytics you can detect relevant conversations more precise, because additionally to the acoustic characteristics textual features are also considered.

Speech Analytics in Workforce Optimization

Speech analytics also represents an integral component of workforce optimization (WFO) solutions. (WFO also encompasses communications recording, quality monitoring, eLearning and workforce management.) This technology, in tandem with speech analytics, improves multiple contact center KPIs including first call resolution (FCR) and average handle time as well as identifying knowledge gaps and training needs for call center agents. As a result, agent performance and customer satisfaction improve significantly. Workforce optimization solutions use keyword spotting or phonetic indexing. The latter technology provides greater flexibility for variable search terms, while keyword spotting offers a greater matching accuracy.

Conclusion

Thanks to its transformation of unstructured data, technological advancements and the ability to boost revenue and customer loyalty, as well as offering enterprise-wide feedback, speech analytics will continue its expansion in contact centers for the foreseeable future.