The Promise of Speech Analytics: A Real Time Game Changer for Call Center Operations

The Promise of Speech Analytics: A Real Time Game Changer for Call Center Operations

2 min read

You’ve heard statistics like these before – it takes 12 positive experiences to make up for one negative experience; news of bad customers reaches twice as many ears as praise for good service; it is 6-7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep one. It’s clear that with customers calling the shots, contact centers will need to evolve from support centers to customer experience centers or face the risk of extinction.

So, how can businesses deliver superior customer experience and engagement? To start with, they need deep insights into agent-customer interactions. Mere technical details such as, who the caller is, or the general context of the call will no longer suffice. This is where Speech Analytics can help businesses understand the nuances of agent-customer interaction.

The value behind the science of Speech Analytics

Modern Speech Analytics (SA) platforms underpinned by high-performance processors and new algorithms that support near-real-time results are being used across industries today. Their adoption rates are the highest in telecom and healthcare, followed by retail, pharma and financial.   The solution’s real-time processing capability  helps companies derive insightful information from the thousands of hours of call recordings.

Speech analytics promises intelligence that enables rapid recognition of caller’s intent and assists agents through complex transactions such as the cross and up-selling efforts, leading to revenue enhancement. In addition, it performs root cause analysis, for continuous process improvements.

A recent survey carried out by Opus Research and commissioned by Uniphore reveals the perceptions towards and the trends that are impacting the emergence of SA products. Among the survey respondents comprising 500 C-level decision makers of contact center firms, customer satisfaction ranked high among the list of motivators for deploying Speech Analytics solutions. Other major highlights from the survey include:

  • 49% of the respondents linked improved customer service to lower costs due to shorter handling times.
  • Nearly 50% of the respondents had deployed Speech Analytics solutions, with 75% realizing cost reductions and 71% realizing enhanced customer experience.
  • 56% saw revenue enhancement while 43% witnessed operational improvement.
  • 83% of the enterprises that had already deployed Speech Analytics, had achieved the expected ROI (both from cost savings and revenue enhancement) in less than 12 months.

Increased spending on Speech Analytics is on the cards

With changing market conditions, enterprises are seeking contextual Speech Analytics with improved architecture, while minimizing capital spending- through cloud applications and pay-as-you-go subscriptions. With consumers increasingly adopting smartphones equipped with voice recognition programs, companies that are focused on customer service have more compelling reasons to invest in advanced Speech Analytics platforms. In fact, a surprisingly high percentage of companies plan to increase their spending on Speech Analytics solutions over the next 1-3 years, especially in North America. Overall, the future promises to be bright for enterprise grade Speech Analytics solutions as their benefits become more apparent with increased adoption.

 

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