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Companies that implement speech analytics can benefit from more sales, happier customers, better first call resolution rates, and more effective agents, blogged Monet Software’s (News - Alert) Chuck Ciarlo. Yet, just 15 percent of contact centers were using speech analytics as of July, added Mike Bourke of Aspect.

Maintrax explained one cable TV company used speech analytics to lower customer churn.

“A client in the cable TV industry purchased a speech tool to identify at-risk customers who had given subtle indications they were likely to defect,” it said. “Given the potential ROI, the company assembled and tasked a team of loyalty experts to place outbound calls to high-risk customers within 48 hours of the initial customer call.

The initiative was a success, added Maintrax.

“Of the at-risk customers reached live, 20 percent were considered by agents to be irrefutably safe with the revenue stream protected,” it wrote. “Of these, 60 percent were retained by extending a special offer, while 40 percent were retained based on the resolution of a technical issue. Fully three-quarters of the rest of the at-risk customers who were reached were deemed to be safe by virtue of the courtesy call itself. Many customers who appeared to be on the verge of disconnecting expressed gratitude for the company’s attentiveness and sensitivity to their situation.”

Bourke says there are two basic kinds of speech analytics solutions used in the contact center. One is the phonetics variety. It allows for fast processing but actual searches tend to be slow and often turn up false results. The other is a transcription-based approach known as Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition. This version of speech analytics, Bourke says, is more accurate but requires more time for processing since it’s working from a larger library.