There is little doubt that enhancing the customer experience is a top priority of organizations around the world. This is true regardless of size or location. This importance is reflected in the fact that the fastest growing C-level positions, particularly in large enterprises, for the past several years bear titles that along with “chief” includes “customer experience” in them. 

In addition, as a result of the “customer-centric” focus, a premium has been placed on “hearing the voice of the customer.”  However, what this means can be problematic. 

Enabling frontline people to be more responsive by employing so-called omni-channel technology to assure they interact with customers, ecosystem partners and a variety of stakeholders according to customer preferences, is only part of the story.  Realities are that despite the growing use of chat, social media, self-service and the like, voice (now with the addition of real-time video) remains the dominant means customers use to get their most pressing issues responded to in a timely manner.  They want to talk to somebody.

In today’s always on, always on/all ways connected world, context is emerging as the new king when it comes to customer interactions. Differentiated value and customer loyalty depend more and more on having an enriched understanding of the customer. Providing individualized experiences are now critical to creating sustainable value and customer loyalty.  In short, just listening is not sufficient.

The challenge for frontline people and their supervisors is that there is a measurable qualitative difference between listening to the customer and actually hearing them and responding in a manner that delights them.  This is where the use of speech analytics has become something that has, and should be, moving from customer experience nicety to necessity.

Put simply, having rich context is the key to really hearing somebody. Thus, whether you are a contact center, call recording platform, conferencing provider, video management solution or hosted PBX (News - Alert) the single most important part of any conversation remains what’s said. This means not just recording all interactions but using insights gained from integration of all tools involved in customer interactions with other tools in real-time to get the best understanding of what the customer wants in order to be more responsive. 

The good news is that with the combined improvements to accuracy, turnaround time and cost, speech analytics is now readily available for businesses of any size. Being able to surface insights from recordings enables businesses to now do for the phone lines, what HubSpot (News - Alert) does for a customer's websites. The intelligence determined from spoken interactions will lead to improved decision making, better customer experiences, a more complete customer profile and higher customer retention rates.

Formally, too expensive, the facts are that sophisticated, inexpensive and highly accurate speech analytics that can evolve/learn over time, have demonstrated their value on a variety of metrics. They provide customer experiences that are in most cases faster by eliminating a lot of the frustrations that occur from calling parties not being properly understood or interacting with the wrong people to resolve their problems.

How speech analytics can empower your frontline people, and create more compelling experiences that engender customer satisfaction and loyalty by leveraging enriched context with an easy-to-use and deploy API is the subject of a forthcoming webinar, Speech Analytics: How to Profit from the ‘Voice of the Customer’ With an API.

To be held Wednesday, May 18, 2016 02:00 PM EDT / 11:00 AM PDT, you are invited to join me, Jay Blazensky , Co-Founder & Chief Revenue Officer, VoiceBase and Drew Thorne-Thomsen, Business & New Channel Development Advisor, as we look at how state-of-the-art speech analytics can help transform the way in which you hear your customers and create more compelling experiences that can right to your bottom line.

Topics to be covered include:

• How to best leverage speech analytics for any market; what should you be looking for?
• The benefits of a speech analytics solution; more data, lower costs, improved ROI
• The top business drivers for integrating a speech analytics solution into your recording platform
• The process and training requirements to receive elite predictive analytics results  

Those who believe that speech will disappear as the dominant way customers choose to interact when they want results need to rethink this view.  Voice is not going away. In fact, thanks to new technologies it can be a game-changer for creating and sustaining differentiated value. The voice of the customer is something to be more than listened.  It needs to be heard and acted upon.