Speech Analytics In Marketing

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Speech Analytics: What is the cost to your business of ignoring customer insight?

How many organisations can truly say they know the opinions, motivations and intent of their customer base? They may have an inkling based on sales and retention figures published in the last quarter or what was said by the 1% of customers who responded to their post-call satisfaction survey but this provides a very small snapshot of a much bigger picture.

Quality Insight at Scale

Enter ‘speech analytics’, moving beyond the realm of an emerging technology, some 28% of contact centres are now using this type of technology according to recent research from Frost & Sullivan which bills the technology as the ‘new secret weapon to boosting performance’.

Speech analytics effectively takes unstructured data such as voice recordings and indexes those calls in a way which makes any of the content searchable at up to 200x real time. The real skill comes from identifying the right questions to ask and the art of creating queries and search parameters which enable organisations to achieve quality insight at scale.

Using those insights and through a process of continual refinement, organisations can create a sustainable programme of improvements across all their related workflow processes.

Proof of Concept

Speech analytics can be applied to address many different business objectives including: driving down average handle time, increasing sales revenue, customer retention and improving first-call resolution. Application deployment should be in accordance with a sound ROI model and scaled to match operational practicality before going enterprise wide.

Any good analytics provider can supply a complete proof of concept (POC) using a call centre’s own data to build a genuine financial model.

These POCs typically address core business objectives identified by the call centre. Specific queries can be generated across a sizeable sample of extracted data which then pinpoints insights and actions, which if implemented can achieve significant cost savings all whilst building the case for board level sign-off and investment.

Differentiation

Speech analytics can be a powerful differentiator, particularly in the outsourced call centre market where competitive advantage is key to attracting and retaining new clients. The ability to offer near real-time feedback on interactions and to identify problem processes before they become firmly embedded is a compelling argument. Agent performance can be significantly improved with real-time monitoring, and the ability to profile the characteristics of customers and exceptional agents can not be underestimated.

The Cost of Ignoring Customer Insight

Never before have call centres been in the position to ‘discover what they don’t know’ by simply delving into a pool of knowledge they already possess. As businesses struggle to remain profitable in difficult times and consumer purchasing continues to slow this is not the time to ignore a powerful tool which can address the balance. Reports back from companies who have already deployed this technology suggest that within the first 12 months following implementation they are seeing at least a two-fold return on their investment.

Related reading

Contributors

David Mason Business Systems

Author: Jonty Pearce

Published On: 14th Mar 2010 - Last modified: 4th Jan 2023
Read more about - Customer Service Strategy, ,

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