Speech Analytics in the Contact Centre: 2020 Survey Results

This article contains the extracted Speech Analytics Chapter of our ‘What Contact Centres Are Doing Right Now’ 2020 survey report, which was sponsored by Voci Technologies.

Will the Take-up of Speech Analytics in the Contact Centre Industry Increase Over the Next Five to Ten Years?

The Take-Up of Speech Analytics is Set to Continue to Rise

The vast majority of our contact centre professionals (84.1%) believe that the take-up of speech analytics will continue to grow over the next five to ten years.

In fact, the majority of this 84.1% were absolute in their response, with more answering “yes, definitely” than “yes, to some extent”.

This would fit the growing trend that has seen the uptake of speech analytics grow significantly from 9.2% of contact centres implementing the technology in 2016 to 21.4% in 2020. (question 3)

However, despite the technology’s strong progress within the call centre industry, some do doubt that it will become “mainstream” before 2030.

How Do You Select the Contacts That You Monitor for Coaching Purposes?

Old-School Call-Selection Methods Reign Supreme

Almost four in every five contact centres (79.5%) are using random selection to select the contacts that they monitor for coaching purposes.

The fact that many more contact centres are doing this than using feedback to target calls or targeting different call types is a slight concern – indicating that many contact centres are basing coaching on “pot luck” alone.

This indicates that some operations are putting a lot of thought into how they can maximize their time, by analysing the contacts that provide the best sources for learning for their agents.

Speech Analytics is Being Underutilized

If only 8.8% of operations are using speech analytics to select calls, this would suggest that many organizations are not deploying their system to support manual call centre coaching. This seems strange, as this is an area in which speech analytics can deliver great value.

However, with many contact centres having only recently installed the technology in the past couple of years, it seems that some are still finding their feet with their systems.

How Do You Measure First Contact Resolution (FCR)?

Repeat Contacts is the Most Common Method (Controversially!)

25.5% of contact centres say that they measure FCR through measuring repeat contacts – making it the most widespread method of calculating the metric.

But you have to be careful with this because you can never really know if the customer is calling about the same issue or something else. There is also a chance that they will call back so far in the future that it’s considered a separate issue.

With that being said, some of the other ways of calculating FCR in the chart are frowned on. For example, if we ask the customer on the call and they indicate that their issue has been resolved, it is still possible that they will discover a problem at a later date and call back. That would then be treated as a new contact.

Tracking Call Reason Codes

The second most popular method, tracking call reason codes, will be more effective, and using an analytics system is an even more effective method.

But, as a final word of warning, from all of the methods presented in the chart, we can see that benchmarking FCR externally is an almost impossible task. So it’s probably best to avoid that one.

Do You Measure Customer Emotion / Sentiment in Your Contact Centre?

Almost a Quarter of Contact Centres are Measuring Customer Emotion

24.8% of contact centres are now measuring customer emotion, with many going one step further by targeting specific emotions.

To target specific emotions this 9.8% of contact centres will likely be using a method called “sentiment analysis”, which is made possible by speech analytics systems.

Many organizations define which emotions drive value for them, and these contact centres will likely be tracking how good a job they are doing in delivering experiences that hit those emotions.

Customer Emotion is a Metric on the Rise

While the percentage of contact centres that are not measuring customer emotions is still well above those that do, that could well soon change. From the chart, we can see that over a third of contact centres are planning to introduce the metric in the future (35.0%).

However, 40.2% of organizations confirmed that they have no plans to introduce a customer emotion measure into their contact centre.

On a Scale of 1–5 (Where 5 Is Very Useful), Rate How Useful You Would Find Each of the Following Speech Analytics Capabilities?

Speech Analytics Has Many Useful Capabilities

The chart below shows that speech analytics can provide many capabilities that over half of our industry professionals believe would be “very useful” in their contact centre.

Unsurprisingly, the ability of a speech analytics system to find broken processes came out on top, especially considering that 43.3% of contact centre professionals believe that broken processes are a significant barrier to running their ideal contact centre – as found in question 5.

The other three speech analytics capabilities that would be considered “very useful” by half of our survey participants were: collecting customer insights (58.1%), automating quality scorecards (54.4%) and providing key coaching insights (51.2%).

Follow this link to view the full Call Centre Helper survey report ‘What Contact Centres Are Doing Right Now‘.

Alternatively if you are interested in a specific chapter read one of these extracts next:

• General
• Customer and Contact Centre Trends
• Workforce Management
• Cloud

This survey was done in partnership with Business Systems, Jacada, Voci Technologies and Vonage.

Author: Robyn Coppell