The Benefits of Speech Analytics for Customer Service

Artificial intelligence (AI) is perhaps one of the fastest growing technologies for customer service and the contact center. Most AI solutions are designed to augment and enhance existing contact center and telephony solutions, with the goal of improving customer interactions and increasing productivity and efficiency in the call center.

Speech analytics are an important part of this trend, and have a direct impact on customer service quality. Specifically, speech analytics technology analyzes recorded calls with the goal of gathering customer information to improve communications and customer service. AI is applied to huge amounts of data buried in customer interactions to mine them for intelligence, in an effort to steer and hone customer service strategies. The result is the potential to cut costs, analyze trends and pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of customer service representatives as well as the entire customer interaction process.

When applied specifically to the contact center, speech analytics have a number of benefits. Perhaps one of the most interesting is they provide insight to help companies keep up with their competitors. Customers themselves often offer up valuable information about the pricing and practices of competitors, which might be overlooked by busy customer service representatives. Speech analytics will help pick out specific comments to glean insights about how competitors run their businesses.

The technology is also extremely useful for drilling down and pinpointing certain problems and issues so they may be addressed directly. Speech analytics has the ability to assess thousands of calls and analyze a variety of parameters, creating logical associations about potential problem areas that need to be addressed. This type of technology can also detect stress and emotions by examining speech patterns, which can be useful for helping especially needy or potentially angry or upset customers.

Most jaded customers ignore the dreaded and repeated requests to participate in surveys about their customer service interactions. Speech analytics can bypass the survey entirely, offering insights about how an interaction went without the need for customer participation. The technology also has the ability to track issues and patterns about specific products or services. This can be especially useful for repeated issues, and enable agents to inform customers and address potential problems before they occur, eliminating the need for follow up calls and potential stress and frustration.

Speech analytics offer myriad benefits for customer service and the contact center. As AI technology continues to grow and improve organically, this feature will become a mainstay in customer service solutions.