Return on investment is the ultimate goal of any change in policy or strategy and the more quickly it happens, the better. Speech analytics in particular can offer your call center operation quick and significant ROI by giving your call center managers’ easy access to call recordings that can be used to evaluate service levels or customer concerns.

In the case of CSI’s (News - Alert) Virtual Observer suite, speech analysis is an add-on, but is directly integrated within the quality monitoring solution. Virtual Observer’s unique set of speech tools enable your staff to save an incredible amount of time in their everyday quality processes.

"The call centers that use speech analytics essentially employ an automated tool which does the listening for them.  Finding calls is faster, finding the right calls to score is faster, and with our specific speech analytics suite, Virtual Observer Call Insight, calls are scored and tagged automatically, as soon as they are recorded and then phonetically indexed. It's all about speed," said Rich Marcia, marketing director of CSI.

As Marcia points out, incorporating a speech analytics solution to your call center routine is also a fairly recent one. He said, "Speech analytics used to be this behemoth of a purchase, a benefit only realized by the fortune 500. Now, with our solution and others, speech has become affordable and easy to implement. Modern ingenuity tells you the price of a powerful technology like speech analytics will come down over time.  We were able to research the industry for three years and select the right methodologies as our competition were stumbling through options as they rushed to hit the market prematurely with speech. I'd say our team took the right approach."

Adding speech analytics to your call recording strategy is a great way to quickly improve customer service levels and automatically organize your call recording archives. It’s also a great way to give supervisors some time back, allowing them to perform other tasks or to cross-train and tackle new initiatives.

Chris DiMarco is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Quinnipiac University. Prior to joining TMC (News - Alert) Chris worked with e-commerce provider Suresource as a contact center representative and development analyst. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Janice McDuffee