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Benefits and Differentiating from Speech Analytics
The modern consumer has more choices than ever, putting brands under pressure to understand what customers want and to deliver the perfect experience every time. Advanced technologies, like voice analytics, help meet rising customer expectations by recognizing their emotions, intent and sentiments on live calls and web chats and enabling organizations to respond appropriately.
As companies have more conversations and generate more data, it’s vital to understand what customers say and how they say it. Voice analytics addresses these challenges, helping companies improve customer satisfaction and optimize agent performance.
Voice analytics software, or sentiment analysis, reveals the emotions driving a conversation and customers’ decisions. The technology enables you to accurately gauge a caller’s mood and analyze their feelings during a conversation.
Voice analytics technology analyzes the audio patterns in a conversation, including how words are said and speech features like pitch, rhythm, stress, tempo and tone. It can monitor conversations in real time or retrospectively analyze them using speech-to-text or transcription technology.
These capabilities make voice analytics a critical tool in customer service. It helps you detect positive and negative sentiments and address them immediately. The technology can detect when a caller feels angry, confused or unhappy, allowing you to take actions that boost customer retention and loyalty.
Voice analytics provides insight into how a customer says something rather than simply what they say. The technology analyzes conversation patterns and breaks down a customer’s emotions throughout an interaction, providing a more informed picture of their mood.
For example, a customer may use a word like “good” or “great” that most speech analysis tools would consider a positive sentiment. However, voice analytics software explores how words are said to detect sarcasm or emotions like anger, which completely change their meaning.
Voice analytics can be used during live customer calls or for post-call analysis and agent coaching purposes. The technology can evaluate conversations and score them based on your key performance indicators (KPIs) and predefined targets. That insight can then help call center managers understand the success of customer interactions and assess their agents’ performance.
Speech analytics, or audio mining, identifies human speech and text through automated speech recognition and turns it into structured data. A speech analytics solution involves using an engine that converts speech into data, an indexing layer that searches for the information, a query engine that allows users to query the data and a reporting application that helps you present the analytical findings.
The main difference in voice analytics vs speech analytics is that the former allows you to delve deeper into the granularities of customer conversations. The benefits of voice analytics include combining contextual data, such as the customer’s feelings and sentiments, with AI. The technology can then generate actionable data that organizations can use to improve future interactions, train their contact center agents and target KPIs.
Voice analytics technology can help contact centers improve their customer service operations in several ways. It allows organizations to solve customer challenges more quickly and enhance the capabilities of their call agents. Voice analytics benefits include:
Improved customer experience and satisfaction
Voice analytics enables contact center agents to access customer histories and use real-time insights to deliver the caller's expected experience. It also boosts customer satisfaction by helping you categorize complaints and link them to specific issues or products. As a result, you can manage complaints more effectively, enhance problem-solving, resolve challenges more quickly and increase customer happiness.
Revenue generation support
Because voice analytics detects customers’ sentiment and emotions, it can help call center agents gauge callers’ receptiveness to upselling or cross-selling opportunities. For example, a customer who expresses frustration at a particular service or offering may be open to upgrading for a better experience. Similarly, a customer who’s noticeably enthusiastic might be excited to learn of a new product or service.
Insightful data for strategic decision-making
Voice analytics technology can be used during live customer calls or to provide insight into recorded conversations. The technology can evaluate conversations and score them based on your KPIs and predefined targets. That insight can help contact center managers monitor the success of customer interactions and prioritize agent experience.
Personalization of customer interactions
Contact centers can personalize customer interactions using voice analytics' real-time data-driven insights. This insight enables companies to develop new products or offerings that align with customers’ needs and market demand.
Investing in voice analytics offers a wide range of competitive advantages for contact centers, including:
Competitive differentiation
Understanding what customers think of your brand, product and services is vital to competitive differentiation. Accurately capturing customer sentiment allows you to transform workflows, ensure swifter dispute resolution and enhance agent training.
Real-time issue resolution and service improvement
Voice analytics can analyze conversations in real time, enabling contact center agents and managers to resolve any issues during the call. By providing real-time sentiment feedback, the technology allows agents to respond to emotional cues in kind, delivering the empathetic service customers have come to expect.
Reduction in churn through proactive engagement
Leaving callers hanging during an issue resolution or making them sit in a hold queue increases the likelihood of customer churn. Voice analytics provides agents with real-time insights and historical data that allows them to proactively engage customers and solve challenges as quickly as possible.
Enhanced agent performance and training
Voice analytics technology can provide agents with sentiment-based guidance on live calls, evaluate conversations and score agent performance based on your KPIs. Metrics like average hold time, call resolution speed and sentiment score can quantify an agent’s success. While recorded conversations can be used to train agents on best practices and common issues.
Scalable analysis of customer trends and behaviors
Using voice analytics allows you to identify patterns and trends in customer interactions. This insight can help you optimize processes, refine scripts and provide targeted training to meet customer needs and improve operational efficiency.
Optimized resource allocation based on customer needs
Voice analytics can detect gaps and friction points within the customer experience by identifying common frustrations and missed expectations. Contact centers can then use this information to patch holes in the customer journey and/or target areas for improvement. As a result, contact centers can channel their resources more efficiently and make the enhancements that customers want.
Deploying voice analytics isn’t simply a case of plugging the technology in and expecting it to do all the hard work. To maximize the benefits of voice analytics, you need to put in some groundwork and define a clear strategy for its success. Here are a few best practices to help you get the best out of voice analytics:
As with any technology, it’s crucial to have clear objectives for using voice analytics and the goals you want to achieve with it. Defining your objectives and goals before implementation enables you to accurately monitor its success and tweak your processes to constantly optimize the technology.
Before implementing any solution, it’s vital to ensure it aligns with your existing data policies. Any voice analytics software you deploy must comply with all internal and regulatory requirements for voice recording and analysis, including any disclosures or usage restrictions.
It’s crucial to assess several voice analytics solutions to select the one that best aligns with your needs. Start by evaluating your problem, then research, test and compare options before making a final decision. Selecting a solution that aligns with your needs will boost the efficiency of your contact center and help you gain a competitive advantage.
Your voice analytics solution must integrate effectively with your existing technology stack and be compatible with other software. Compatibility with your chosen customer relationship management program and other systems will help maximize the value of data across your data center.
Before implementing a voice analytics solution, it’s essential to assess the current state of your data and define your vision and goals, such as increasing data quality, reducing data duplication and improving data accessibility. You should also develop a strategy built around a data governance framework and data management solutions that help you maximize the value of data.
Your voice analytics solution will only be successful if your team understands how it works and how to use it effectively. Book training for your agents before the solution is rolled out and schedule regular catch-up sessions and best practice reminders.
Before hitting go on your voice analytics solution, set targets you want to achieve with the technology. These metrics can evolve as your agents get up to pace with the technology or to meet changing customer needs.
The longer you use a voice analytics solution, the more data you’ll generate. Reviewing and acting on this data can reveal new insights, such as customer needs, that help you shape product development and create new revenue streams.
It’s also vital to keep an open mind as you bring a voice analytics solution into your technology chain. Encourage your team to share feedback, ideas and suggestions for change and listen to customer feedback on their expectations and preferences. Embedding this culture across your organization can improve customer service and enhance customer loyalty and advocacy.
You can also continually improve and refine your voice analytics solution through ongoing collaboration. This can help you maximize the benefits of the technology, get the first access to new features and help your agents constantly provide optimal customer support.
Uniphore’s voice analytics and AI technology helps you take control of your data and uncover unique customer experience insights. Uniphore’s screen and call recording software, U-Capture, ensures full access to real-time call data without impacting call recordings, helping you enhance performance across your contact center. The technology offers AI-ready data from enterprise recordings and uses AI-driven insights to help you understand the context of every conversation agents have with customers.
Pairing U-Capture with Uniphore’s conversational analytics tool, U-Analyze, allows you to unlock highly detailed insights into individual and overall customer sentiment, emotion and intent. Together, these tools allow you to identify customer experience friction points, proactively reengage dissatisfied customers, gauge upsell/cross-sell receptiveness and identify emerging topics and hidden opportunities.
Find out how Uniphore’s technology can transform the performance of your contact center by downloading our guide to customer service transformation. You can also explore how to enhance your customer interactions with Uniphore’s voice analytics and AI technology.