Historically, recognising the spoken word has been challenging for some businesses and their contact centres. The most advanced vendors can now, however, provide technology that matches business requirements, including accuracy, real-time processing, semantic interpretation, continuous, automatic learning and others.
This can partly be attributed to leading speech analytic researchers enhancing their algorithms and also to leading vendors that have the capacity and capabilities to combine this research with advanced technologies.
Speech analytics covers many functional topics and has wide business use beyond simple speech-to-text recognition and basic voice recognition.
There is a common perception that analysing the spoken word is expensive and time-consuming. Businesses often sample a few recordings and supplement that information with various surveys. As a result businesses would sometimes gain inaccurate pictures, or false positives, from surveys and random samplings.
Advanced speech analytics solutions now enable them to see all of the connections in every call and in real-time. Emotion detection is another emerging capability. Here, speech analytics technology helps organisations determine a customer’s mind-set. What companies would like to know is what makes a call change from happy to sad or vice versa. Speech analytics accomplishes this goal by correlating words to actions.
There are many business areas where speech analytics can provide significant business value, not least the contact centre. Even as digital volumes increase, its predicted that the number of voice channel interactions will increase too. According to recent contact centre studies, 82.5 per cent of companies recognise customer experience (CX) as a competitive differentiator and 77.5 per cent recognise CX as the most important strategic performance measure. In addition, 77 per cent can evidence cost savings via improved CX and 74.1 per cent say it increases company revenue/profits. 67.8 per cent forecast an uplift in overall interactions and proactive automation capability is set to rise to 57.2 per cent in next year.
We recently performed a BBA webinar dedicated to ‘Customer Experience Management and Contact Centre – Speech Analytics Technology Trends – Best Practice and Vision 2020’ and will share the main topics and outcomes in a different blog.
