The Power of Voice Analytics

Competitors in every business sector are striving for customer experience (CX) excellence which will drive growth. Gartner estimates that more than 90% of customer conversations happen on the phone. Therefore, telephone conversation is a huge area for CX management.

With many millions of customer conversations happening each and every day, voice traffic is very much “big data”. This data offers insights to those who choose to look deeply.

Voice analytics promises to measure customer emotion in each call. It differentiates between happy, frustrated, and other customer moods. “Call analytics” looks at the data collected. “Speech analytics” considers the spoken content and context of the agent/customer conversation.

Uniquely, “voice analytics” analyses the intonation, syllable stress, tempo, pitch, etc. to derive emotional indicators from the conversation, and more.

Keyword detection can ensure agent adherence to process requirements and the appropriate use of tone. Also, it can spot critical keywords used by the customer to pinpoint problem areas and reduce customer churn.

Voice analytics can also alert management to what is absent in a conversation. Basically, software will spot non-productive moments of silence, music, etc. Consequently, call handling time can be continuously improved to ensure customers experience more efficient service, and the business has an optimized process.

Contact centre agents benefit from automated feedback which is objective, personalized, and delivered in real-time to assist them in delivering great service.

Environmental Dependencies and Customer Experience

These benefits, and potentially many more, will shape the future of customer interaction. But these depend on a high-quality communication channel connecting a business to the customer. Today’s telecommunications infrastructure is a cocktail of legacy TDM networks tied into IP transit links and converged corporate networks.

Networks support a multitude of applications including real-time voice and video. Applications often compete for bandwidth. QoS (Quality of Service) and QoE (Quality of Experience) are ongoing challenges.

Additionally, the rapid growth of cloud services puts key systems, key data, and key communications infrastructure into new hosting situations.

Here, capacity management, incident management, and change activity may trigger the dynamic movement of systems in ways that significantly alter demand patterns. These changes in demand can destabilize networks, and impact quality for real-time applications such as voice.

Managing customer experience in an ever-changing network environment requires a watchful eye, attention to detail, and supporting toolsets.