Top 10 Use Cases for Speech Analytics

Here are the top contact centre challenges where deploying speech analytics can make a real difference. Do any sound familiar?

1. Addressing Verbal Abuse Aimed at Agents

The collision of customer frustration with the imperative of agent wellbeing underscores the need for proactive measures.

With speech analytics, contact centres can generate alerts to enable swift supervisor intervention when agents encounter hostility or aggression.

Timely support is particularly important in industries where agents have limited autonomy or decision-making power to resolve escalating situations.

The added benefit is the ability to analyse ‘problem calls,’ identifying patterns, themes, or recurrent triggers.

These insights enable contact centres to implement targeted strategies to minimize such occurrences, fostering a safer and more supportive environment for agents while enhancing overall customer experience.

Contributed by: Finlay Macmillen, Junior Sales Executive, Odigo

2. Reducing Call Escalations Across Your Team

If your contact centre struggles with high handle times, call escalations, or repeat calls, speech analytics can uncover the root causes.

It identifies patterns contributing to inefficiencies, enabling targeted process improvements for smoother operations.

Speech analytics can offer full visibility into contact centre operations by showing call drivers and tracking data over time.

Contributed by: Tatiana Polyakova, COO, MiaRec

3. Overhauling an Unfair QA Process

Speech analytics becomes invaluable to organizations that have a person or people reviewing calls for quality assurance, employee training or legal requirements.

If you’re performing these tasks, then speech analytics can streamline the hours it takes to do that. Plus, it can remove human errors and ensure you create fair and consistent benchmarking.

Contributed by: Chris Angus, VP, EMEA Contact Centre Engagement, 8×8

4. Driving Real Action With All That Data You’ve Collected

Organizations are swimming in data, yet much remains untouched or unanalysed – leaving valuable insights into customer behaviours, preferences, brand perceptions and product experiences falling to the wayside.

With the right speech analytics solution, organizations can more effectively collect and analyse data at scale, automatically uncovering insights that can reduce customer effort, optimize agent performance, inform marketing or product development efforts, and more.

By revealing trends across all customer interactions, like silence times and average handle times, organizations can improve agent performance and overall customer experience.

Contributed by: Frank Sherlock, VP of International, CallMiner

5. Better Managing Increases in Volume

If you are seeing an overwhelming increase in interaction volume, speech analytics is a great way to figure out the root causes.

Speech analytics technology can be used to gain insights from digital and voice interactions to determine if your customers have a common issue with a product or service.

Perhaps customers are reaching out because a product is malfunctioning, or maybe it stops working shortly after purchase.

Speech analytics can help you to discover key details or commonalities across interactions.

The insights then generate actionable steps organizations can take to rectify the situation, so they continue to deliver products and services that exceed customer expectations.

Contributed by: Michele Carlson, Senior Product Marketing Manager, NICE

6. Bringing Persistent Problems Under Control

In the face of persistent challenges where traditional numerical metrics confirm the presence of issues but fail to provide actionable insights, speech analytics can offer real-world solutions.

For example, in situations with low FCR or high internal transfers, speech analytics enable comprehensive analysis of call content for patterns and trends.

In-call surveys used in conjunction with speech analytics provide real-time, authentic feedback, facilitating immediate intervention in problem areas.

Furthermore, in-call surveys used in conjunction with speech analytics provide real-time, authentic feedback, facilitating immediate intervention in problem areas.

This capability equips contact centres with the tools needed to identify root causes and implement targeted strategies for continuous improvement, ultimately enhancing overall operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Contributed by: Finlay Macmillen, Junior Sales Executive, Odigo

7. Ditching Time-Consuming Training Processes

When training new agents or improving existing ones becomes time-consuming and ineffective, speech analytics can help.

It identifies training needs by analysing common customer issues, agent responses, and successful interactions, streamlining training efforts.

Some solutions can also leverage AI coaching opportunities, automatically providing feedback based on the context of the conversation and streamlining the coaching processes by offering next training steps and suggesting knowledge articles.

Contributed by: Tatiana Polyakova, COO, MiaRec

8. Making More Informed Decisions

If you’re moving towards an NPS or CSAT score focus to measure success, speech analytics can be combined with sentiment analysis to get a proactive handle on your customers’ experience.

Imagine being able to feed all this insight back into a data lake that enables you to make informed decisions on how best to handle your customer enquiries.

Contributed by: Chris Angus, VP, EMEA Contact Centre Engagement, 8×8

9. Better Understanding What’s Irritating Your Customers

At its simplest level, a speech analytics tool can conduct 100% compliance QA, potentially providing increased adherence whilst also introducing cost efficiencies.

At more in-depth levels, conversational speech AI tools such as Sentient Machines can deliver powerful insight, enabling focused training, process improvement, and understanding of customer points of irritation.

Ultimately this opens the door to improved customer satisfaction, increased customer tenure, and advocacy.

Contributed by: Dave D’Arcy, Laughing Leadership

10. Identifying Key Areas for Improvement

If customers are complaining often or satisfaction scores drop, it might be a sign that you need a better understanding of what’s happening during interactions.

Speech analytics can provide insight into agent performance and identify training areas to boost customer experience.

Another area where speech analytics can make a big difference is quality assurance. If manual quality checks are slowing things down or not providing the level of insight required to drive business improvements, it’s a sign that the current system isn’t giving the whole picture.

Speech analytics simplifies quality assurance by putting all call data into one comprehensive dashboard, making it easy for managers to identify outliers or areas for improvement and take action quickly.

Contributed by: Ben Booth, CEO, MaxContact

For more great insights and advice from our panel of experts, read these articles next:

• Need to Reduce Call Transfers? Try These Approaches
• Key Questions to Ask When Buying a Chatbot
• How to Keep Your Knowledge Base Up to Scratch

Author: Robyn Coppell
Reviewed by: Xander Freeman