For companies with their own call center, contact center, or customer service department, it is essential to monitor the work of specialists on the phone. Listening to and analyzing all calls would require a lot of time or a large team of specialized employees. The speech analytics call center comes to the rescue if there are no resources.

Read our article about what it is and how it can help businesses.

What Is Real-Time Speech Analytics?

Speech analytics is a convenient service for analyzing phone calls. With its help, speech is recognized, converted into text, and evaluated based on important metrics for the company. The tool also checks compliance with sales scripts and communication rules with customers over the phone.

The result: You will know who was rude to the customer or did not offer additional products or services.

Speech analytics operates based on speech recognition technology — it does not get tired or sick and can work 24/7. The program can process and provide analysis results for many calls of varying durations in some minutes.

How Does Real-Time Speech Analytics Work?

The operation of speech analytics is based on three mechanisms:

Online speech recognition

Speech analytics tools listen to conversations and differentiate speech. The system understands which words were spoken and separates them within a sentence. It then compiles this text into a chat-like transcript.  In this dialogue, you can find any word in all its forms. This allows you to track whether the operator uses the necessary words for the sales funnel and how the customer reacts to them.

Before the emergence of neural networks, supervisors had to handle dialogues. Operators listened to conversations, noted important words, and tagged them. Machine speech analytics works more efficiently and can process more dialogues in less time.

Conversation tagging

The system assigns tags to the prepared text. Each tag (News - Alert) includes a set of words or phrases that can be used to evaluate the specialist's work. For example, you can find out that during communication with a potential buyer, the manager used sales stop words such as "I don't know," "You're wrong," or "I don't recommend." This demonstrated his incompetence and left a negative impression on the company. As a result, the client left, and marketing techniques need to be applied to win them back.

The number of tags will depend on the algorithm of each system and the business goals. If this process is automated, it can address various business concerns:

• Analyzing departments and understanding who interacts more successfully with customers
• Saving supervisors’ time by eliminating the need to listen to calls and analyze mistakes manually
• Determining which dialogue scheme leads to sales and which does not
• Identifying new and repeat calls, as well as filtering out non-targeted customers.

Reporting

The next step is generating insights and metrics after analyzing recorded customer interactions. The system delivers a visually understandable assessment of each agent's performance. These reports help call center managers and supervisors understand performance, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions to improve customer service and agent effectiveness.

What Issues Does Speech Analytics Help Address?

These are only some of the issues that this tool helps businesses address:

Sentiment analysis

Speech analytics can determine the tone and emotional content of spoken text. This is useful for assessing the mood and emotions in a conversation or customer feedback. For example, in customer service, this can be used to identify customer dissatisfaction.

Speaker identification

Speech analytics systems can determine who is speaking in an audio recording. This can be used for user voice authentication or tracking speakers in multi-speaker conversations.

Analysis of keywords and phrases

This tool can highlight keywords and phrases in the text, allowing for the identification of important themes and trends in the conversation.

Customer service quality monitoring

This technology can monitor and analyze customer interactions in call centers. It can identify which words and phrases are used in conversations and assess the quality of customer service.

Task automation

Speech analytics can automate various tasks, such as generating reports based on conversation recordings, classifying and labeling data, and much more.

Why Do Call Centers Need Speech Analytics?

In large companies, a quality control department listens to calls and tracks whether the employee was polite with the customer, spoke according to company standards, and helped resolve the issue. Employees in the quality control department do their work manually. However, it's important to remember that human capabilities are not limitless.

For instance, one employee may be able to listen to, transcribe, and evaluate about 100 daily calls. But by the end of the workday, they will likely lose concentration and may get sick or go on vacation. If the call center makes 10,000 calls daily, it would take one full day and a team of 100 quality control staff to analyze them. Maintaining such a department is impossible — there's hardly any practical example of such a setup.

Typically, only a few people in the department selectively listen to calls. This means they can only process about 15% of all calls. But with speech analytics, you can listen to and analyze 100% of them.

How Can Businesses Benefit From Real-time Speech Analytics?

Enhanced customer service

Speech analytics enables organizations to monitor customer interactions in real time and help call centers improve customer service by addressing issues promptly, identifying customer needs, and ensuring a positive customer experience.

Increased operational efficiency

By analyzing conversations in real-time, organizations can identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, or compliance issues as they occur, enabling timely adjustments to processes and workflows.

Quality assurance and compliance

Real-time speech analytics ensures that agents adhere to scripts, comply with regulations, and maintain quality standards during customer interactions.

Proactive problem-solving

Organizations can identify emerging issues or trends by analyzing conversations in real time before they escalate into more significant problems. This proactive approach allows companies to address customer concerns promptly, minimize negative feedback, and prevent potential crises.

Personalized customer experience

Real-time speech analytics can help organizations gather insights into customer preferences, sentiment, and interaction behavior. This data can personalize customer experiences, tailor product offerings, and anticipate customer needs in real time.

Continuous improvement

Real-time speech analytics provides valuable data for ongoing performance evaluation and process improvement. By analyzing this data, organizations can identify areas for optimization, refine strategies, and continuously enhance their operations.

The Bottom Line

Every company aims to carve out a niche and establish strong market positions to increase profits and expand. Real-time speech analytics is an indispensable tool that helps to analyze conversations with customers and make informed management decisions comprehensively. With its assistance, you can monitor managers' communication with customers, fine-tune targeting, optimize advertising campaign expenses, and increase conversion rates.