Key Takeaways from 2019 Global Survey of Speech Analytics

Key Takeaways from 2019 Global Survey of Speech Analytics

2 min read

The fourth edition of our Global Survey of Speech Analytics and Conversational Service Automation – Destination 2020, is out. Uniphore and its partner Opus Research, revealed key findings at the Conversational Commerce Conference (C3) last week held at New York.

Opus Research has been annually tracking the impact of Speech Analytics technologies to enable enterprises fast-track digital transformation and improve customer experience. The 2019 survey of 400 decision-makers (Director, VP, C-level) in contact center operations, customer service, and contact center management reveals growing interest among organizations in real-time customer journey orchestration and intelligent assistance.

#1: Speech Analytics moving from a point solution to full-scale Conversational Service Automation

Global enterprises over the years can be located on a continuum that starts with treating speech analytics as a point solution, in 2016, with a limited number of applications and it culminates, in 2020, as Conversational Service Automation. Companies start to move farther along the continuum as they deploy Speech Analytics resources for cost savings and efficiency while constantly expanding integration points beyond the contact center to improve customer experience, promote innovation, enable organizational efficiencies and, ultimately, enhance revenue.

Back in 2016, Speech Analytics and Conversational AI started out as a premise-based, batch processing solution offering limited number of applications. But organizations were quick to realize its significance for advanced applications like AI bolstering employee productivity, advanced real-time analytics, orchestration and automation.

#2: Key Drivers for adoption have changed

Agent training, workforce optimization, identification of customer intent are perennial sources of value and cost savings, as indicated in the tracking study as ‘Evergreen”. The second category of drivers was a more volatile category classified as “Expedient.” Chief among them was “compliance”.

Finally, the “Emerging” category illustrates citations of applications for real-time Speech Analytics and adjacent technologies to break through into “Evergreen” status. These include supporting Automated Virtual Agents by providing insights and suggesting next-best actions in real time and combining real-time analytics and Natural Language Generation (NLG) for automated preparation of post-call disposition reports. These two use cases are real-world examples of Conversational Service Automation.

#3: Global enterprises on the cusp of Conversational Service Automation “self-realization”

Now, in 2019 and beyond, organizations are on a path to give the “customers their voice” and defining steps for rapid recognition of customer intent and of sentiment. It is clear innovative firms are looking at how to enable AI and Speech Analytics for call summarization, orchestration, and automation.

For those who’ve already deployed speech analytics, the 2019 global survey found interest in discovering caller intent, sentiment analysis, training NLU models, enable digital self-service to learn correct responses, and even automate the process to summarize conversational content with post call disposition. All this is helpful in order to maximize the value of investments in the speech analytics journey going forward.

Respondents also spoke of measurable ROI and payback that was the product of greater agent efficiency, reduced average hold times and faster detection of root cause. Conversational Service Automation takes ROI up a notch by further increasing agent efficiency, for example, by automating the process of call summation and reporting. More profitable use cases are waiting in the wings.

Finally, given the results of this Opus Research study, it is strongly evident that enterprises around the globe are on the cusp of Conversational Service Automation “self-realization”. The future can only get better and we are truly excited about it.

You can now download your free copy of the full report here.

Table of Contents

Search