Understanding Speech Analytics

Understanding customer and agent interactions is crucial for improving service and performance.

Speech analytics uses artificial intelligence to analyse voice-based conversations, providing valuable insights that can enhance both customer experience and operational efficiency.

To find out more, we asked MJ Johnson, Senior Director, Product Marketing at CallMiner, David Samuel, Chief Product Officer at Contexta360, and Sean McIver, Product Owner at MaxContact, to explain what speech analytics is.

Video: What is Speech Analytics?

Watch the video below to hear David, MJ and Sean explain what speech analytics is in contact centres:

With thanks to the following people for contributing to this video:

MJ Johnson, Senior Director, Product Marketing at CallMiner
David Samuel, Chief Product Officer at Contexta360
Sean McIver, Product Owner at MaxContact

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What Is Speech Analytics?

Contact centres have thousands of conversations with customers every day. Within these interactions, valuable insights can be lost if they are not analysed effectively.

“Speech analytics is essentially a tool, typically driven by artificial intelligence. This software tool does a couple of things. First, it listens to voice-based conversations, typically between a customer and your business.

And second, it identifies and extracts insights from those conversations that otherwise might be lost and can be useful to a business in making decisions.” – MJ

Speech analytics uses artificial intelligence (AI) to process and extract useful data from voice conversations, helping businesses improve customer experience and agent performance.

How Speech Analytics Works

Speech analytics software listens to recorded or live conversations between customers and agents, as David explains:

“Speech analytics adds that element of automatically analysing all your conversations. And then by using smart scripting, AI, and other sort of ‘smarts’, you can identify insights and other areas of interest.

You can categorize them and combine them with other knowledge sources. And that makes them more intelligible and actionable.”

It then analyses these conversations to identify patterns, keywords, sentiment, and areas of concern, which helps contact centres understand customer needs and improve service.

Key Benefits of Speech Analytics

1. Extracting Insights

AI-driven tools identify trends in customer behaviour and preferences, helping contact centres make informed decisions.

2. Improving Agent Performance

By analysing tone, pauses, and speech patterns, contact centres can assess how agents handle calls and provide targeted training, as Sean explains:

“It also allows you to monitor agent behaviour and understand what some of those triggers may be.

So, for example, you may be able to assess that Jo Bloggs, my agent on the phone, was having challenges with that customer that came across because he had lots of delays, he used lots of uncertainty in his tonality, and his timbre changed, the way in which he spoke to the customer changed. And you can use that as a training mechanism.”