Making the Most of Speech Analytics

Steve McInally shares his 5 guidelines to keep your speech analytics project on track.

For many organisations, speech analytics is still a relatively new discipline. That’s why it is especially important to make sure that you build the right governance around your speech analytics projects.

1. Be clear about your goals

What problems do you actually need to fix first? Pick two or three areas that you want to concentrate on – don’t get caught in the ‘vortex of everything’ by chasing too many issues and losing focus.

2. Build a balanced speech analytics team

Speech analytics can serve as a powerful agent of change, but you need a team in place that combines a mix of talents.

You’ll have experienced, quality people, team leaders who promote speech analytics in the business, communicators who understand language nuance, and the right technical experts. It’s also worthwhile bringing in expertise from outside the team, including marketing and compliance specialists.

3. Align your efforts with your strategy

Speech analytics can really help in terms of getting your customer contact operations on the front foot, tuning activities to directly support corporate strategic goals. Ensure that your team share an understanding of the goals you are working towards.

4. Continue listening to calls

Speech analytics doesn’t replace your existing quality-monitoring activities. While the core speech analytics process is automated, it will still benefit from being calibrated by smart customer contact professionals.

5. Prepare for some trial and error

Successful speech analytics is an iterative process – speech analytics needs to be embedded at the heart of your continuous improvement processes and backed by the right governance.

Go deep and narrow on issues that support your corporate and scorecard goals, resolve issues and then move on to the next ones.

With thanks to Steve McInally at Sabio