By Daniel Ziv, Director of Business Analytics,Verint Systems
Speech analytics is a valuable tool in the contact center environment, but it is seldom fully understood and often underestimated.
By applying advanced speech recognition technology to spoken conversations, speech analytics solutions reveal critical insights that otherwise would go unnoticed. With speech analytics, the benefits of contact center recording reach beyond agent and supervisor performance to optimize customer processes enterprise wide. No longer is just the performance of the agent measurable, but all back-office processes and other customer touch points that shape customer perceptions can be tracked and analyzed.
Advanced speech analytics solutions, such as Verint’s ULTRA IntelliFind, enable businesses to extend their quality monitoring programs to identify quality problems throughout the enterprise. With this capability, organizations can redefine quality inside and outside the contact center, and most importantly, in ways that promote greater customer satisfaction, loyalty, and value.
Key Speech Analytics Technologies
Word spotting, call categorization, and root cause analysis are three distinct, robust technologies used in speech analytics. For a speech analytics solution to be truly successful, optimally measuring and helping to improve an organization’s customer operations, it is vital that it incorporate all three technologies. With this approach, each technology can serve to provide increasingly important value to an organization, starting with word spotting and culminating with root cause analysis. It is this type of speech analytics solution that extends quality initiatives past the contact center.
Word Spotting is the identification of words or phrases that are spoken in customer interactions. With word spotting, it is easy to quickly locate interactions where specific names or phrases are mentioned. For example, you can look for and find agent/customer interactions where a competitor is mentioned or a product is discussed.
The information gathered here is valuable, but because some word spotting applications require words to be defined in advance, it alone does not provide an objective means for detecting trends and identifying avenues to improve performance outcomes. The main reason for this is the fact that it is difficult to guess exactly what customers’ issues may be in advance and in what exact words they will express these issues. Thus, it is important that a speech analytics solution not rely solely on word spotting, but combine the technology with others, such as call categorization, to drive greater value.
Call Categorization is the ability to classify large volumes of calls into business-related categories, based on call content, that include logistic rules (or taxonomies) and additional meta data. Business categories can encompass product feedback, repeat calls, billing issues, etc. Further analysis can be done by drilling down within categories to listen to the most relevant calls. Call categorization enables you to monitor your company’s performance with respect to your business objectives, so that you focus on customer interactions that matter most to you. With call categorization, you can identify and track trends, focus in on ways to reduce call volumes, and improve customer-related processes, among other things.
While an essential element of any speech analytics solution, call categorization on its own will not provide you with objective information about why specific business outcomes occur. For this reason, a speech analytics solution must do more than word spotting and call categorization, where you can understand what is happening. It needs to help you understand why.
Root Cause Analysis automatically reveals the underlying reasons for specific behaviors and business outcomes. By surfacing terms and phrases that appear more frequently in a specific subset or category of calls, root cause analytics reveal issues that you might not know to look for. Unlike key word spotting and call categorization, root cause analysis reveals not just what is happening, but why it is happening. Therefore, you gain a greater understanding of the factors that shape business results.
As an example, using call categorization and trending you may identify that your call center is experiencing a large spike in customer complaints. By applying root cause analysis, you find out that a launch of a new product is behind a large percentage of these complaint calls. This is actionable information that you can immediately use to help reduce customer complaints and increase customer satisfaction. With root cause analysis, you can take what you know is happening, derived from word spotting and call categorization, to understand why and, more importantly, take action to improve performance and results.
Understanding What and Why Takes All Three
A leading speech analytics solution, such as Verint’s ULTRA IntelliFind, does not rely on only one or two of the aforementioned speech recognition technologies. Rather, it combines word spotting, call categorization and trending, and root cause analysis to deliver speech analytics at its fullest potential. With this kind of comprehensive solution, you can better understand not only what your customers are saying, but why and the impact to your operations. You gain strategic insights about the factors that shape customer satisfaction, drive operational costs, and generate revenue. This is actionable intelligence you can use to transform your quality programs into enterprise-wide initiatives, addressing customer touch points in your contact center and across your company.