Speech analytics software has become a vital tool for contact centers. The data you capture from speech analytics can be much more nuanced than the usual hard performance numbers, providing deeper insight to grow your business by improving customer service and overall experience. But there are a lot of speech analytics options on the market. How do you know what to buy for your call center?

We have some recommendations for you – key features to look for, and how to get the most from the speech analytics software you choose – based on years of using speech analytics software in our call centers.

Why Use Speech Analytics Software?

This tool gives you an additional way to listen in on calls. You can hear the words spoken by agents and customers, but you can also hear – and study – intangibles such as tone of voice and context. What you learn can help you improve your call center in a number of ways:

• Manage agent performance
• Manage compliance to scripts or processes
• Collect data about customer voice inflection
• Improve sales performance
• Improve call center efficiency
• Improve customer experience

How We Use Speech Analytics

On the back end, we use this software to manage process changes in the call center. When we train a group of agents on a new process or workflow, we can quickly check across the team for adherence to the new process. Without speech analytics, we would need to listen to calls one at a time. It would take far longer to identify the effectiveness of our training and the results of the process changes we made.

For our clients, we can analyze calls to identify caller sentiment and comments that are made regarding both desirable and undesirable call outcomes. We share this feedback with our clients so they get deeper insight into the effectiveness of their marketing messages and other customer communications.

An in-house call center can also benefit in both of these ways from the right speech analytics software.

Important Features to Look For

When you’re shopping for speech analytics software, these three features are essential:

• A good speech-to-text transcription engine
  This is a critical step, but different software products can vary considerably in their transcription accuracy. You must choose a tool that will correctly capture the words and context of the conversation. A good user interface is also important for ease of analysis. Does the software come with preconfigured analysis for things like caller sentiment and satisfaction? How easy is it to review and analyze the data?
• Security
  Many call recordings contain sensitive information such as credit card information, social security numbers, etc. What security options does the speech analytics tool provide? The most secure systems automatically redact strings of numbers. Other important security features are encryption options and audit logs that show user access.
• Multi-channel capability
  If your contact center handles voice, email, chat, and SMS, does the speech analytics tool allow for analysis on all channels?

After studying the various options on the market, we selected Call Miner to support our work here at The Connection®.

Learn what to do with the customer listening data you collect from speech analytics technology.

How to Make It Work

One of the costliest aspects to maintaining an in-house call center is the need to stay up to date with the latest technology tools required to deliver the experience customers expect. Speech analytics is not a "set it and forget it" technology. It requires ongoing management to work with the data, create meaningful analysis, and put what you learn to work. By partnering with a professional contact center that uses speech analytics and other essential software, you always have what you need to serve customers well.