Are You Missing Out on Valuable Insights From Your Voice Data?

Triana Atallah of Business Systems promotes the use of interaction analytics to gain more actionable insights from your contact centre data.

Voice will always be a powerful data set for organizations. Voice conveys context, emotion and sentiment, providing you with actionable intelligence. Voice is powerful. However, IT leaders could be missing a trick when it comes to this, as not all organizations are recording every interaction, and for some the majority of voice data is not easily accessible.

Collecting voice data is half the battle. Tapping into the insights that voice data can provide you with is a whole other beast. According to a recent Sapio Research survey, a staggering 92 percent of organizations are capturing voice data but are doing little to make use of it.

Here’s a crash course into how you can start enhancing the use of voice data in your organization.

Consolidating Your Data

Often, call recording data does not all reside in one place. This is extremely common when it comes to large organizations with multiple offices (including global ones) and multiple voice recorders from multiple manufacturers.

Over the years, it’s common for an organization’s voice infrastructure to become complicated. Sometimes, it becomes a mix of on-premise and cloud systems. Some of these on-premise systems might be old and no longer supported by the manufacturer in terms of maintenance, software updates and bug fixes. This is what is termed as a ‘legacy call recording system’. The hotchpotch of different systems and different ages means data becomes siloed, hard to access and just plain awkward.

So how can you make sure all your existing voice data is being collected properly? Firstly, consider investing in vendors who have an open API methodology. An open API will give you the flexibility to interact with your data however you see fit.

For example, we helped one large bank automate the process of extracting data from multiple call recording systems into a separate system for the purpose of analytical reporting. This was done all whilst keeping the data in its original file structure and format.

The result was that the bank had the ability to feed their valuable voice data into an application of their choice and were not restricted to one provider which would have limited their capabilities in future; they were able to utilize their existing applications and the API was seen as more of a ‘enabler’ of their existing infrastructure.

So to conclude point one, remember: Using a vendor who has an open API approach means the possibilities are endless for what you can do with your existing data. True data management is more about just storing the data. It’s now about being able to easily access and truly analyse the data for those golden nuggets of information that will drive and transform change in the organization.

Tapping Into the Insight

Let’s go back to our original point – collecting voice data is half the battle. Tapping into the insights which voice data can provide you with is a whole other story. Analysing data and drawing conclusions from it to improve your processes, operational efficiency and overall business management is now imperative to most organizations if they want to stay one step ahead.

One way you can do this is to mine through large volumes of inbound recorded communications across multiple channels. If you’re still doing this manually, by listening to samples of calls, it’s almost impossible. And painful. And lastly, it’s not truly reflective of what is happening across all interactions.

By using interaction analytics however, calls are analysed using phonetics, transcription or a combination of both. Much like what Google does for the internet, speech and interaction analytics can do for voice data.

A neural phonetic interaction analytics solution can combine speech recognition (transcribing communications into text) and phonetic indexing (looking for defined sounds and matching them to target words or phrases in a phonetic index file) into a single powerful engine. This engine allows you to pick up on targeted business insight.

Let’s not forget that these solutions can also be platform-agnostic (can be used across any voice or recording platform), designed to enable analysis across any interaction, be that voice or text-based.

Although getting the voice into these systems can often be the most challenging part – the good news is that we have solved this issue many times for many customers.

As technology develops, sentiment analysis, once a tricky data set to analyse, is now also picked up with these solutions. Sentiment analysis means picking up on acoustic indicators such as pitch, tone, jitter, cross-talk (interruption), laughter and language spoken. Speech and interaction analytics technology provides context behind the interactions, acting as a powerful tool to unlock valuable voice data in any organization.

Let’s not forget that speech and interaction analytics can also uncover valuable insight when it comes to compliance in an organization. Many financial organizations today have implemented this technology to help with the never-ending challenge of compliance, offering features such as:

• Preventing issues from escalating by providing the necessary means to search proactively through recordings for ‘high risk’ keywords and phrases
• Using Boolean operators (e.g. and, or and not) so that users can include multiple search terms in a single query. This means compliance teams can easily check if compulsory statements are being read, for example
• Supporting compliance by quickly finding and retrieving calls requested by regulatory bodies
• Demonstrating a proactive approach to managing risk
• Enabling compliance officers to look for suspicious transactions that they didn’t know were there to begin with

Voice Data Is the Way Forward

Organizations that make the most out of their voice data are the ones who will remain one step ahead. By unlocking the insight behind these communications, operational efficiency, customer satisfaction and compliance adherence can also be unlocked. Tapping into the potential of voice data can be limitless.

Due to the multiplication of communication channels we now have, voice can sometimes be forgotten about. But let’s not forget that as a society dependent on communication, voice is the fundamental principle behind all of these.