What is speech analytics?

Speech analytics is the process of using technologies, such as speech recognition, natural language processing (NLP), and artificial intelligence (AI), to analyze spoken language and gather relevant data from audio recordings or real-time call center conversations. 

Speech analytics software converts millions of calls into structured data, providing meaningful insights into customer sentiments and preferences. It allows an organization to recognize and address customer issues, identifying opportunities to improve service quality.

How speech analytics technology helps to boost call center performance

Think of speech analytics solutions as the most productive and effective teams of reviewers inside your call center. Fully dedicated, they'd listen to every call, find customer pain points or missed opportunities, and evaluate agents' performance – all instantly.

If your business is leveraging clients' data to enhance efficiency, reduce operational costs, and increase sales, you're a step ahead of your competitors. According to a survey from Gartner, organizations prioritize customer data and analytics as a top priority for achieving goals

Here are five reasons why speech analytics technology, one of the foundation elements of Echo AI, transforms your customer service operations:

1. Allowing quick actions with real-time issue identification

Need to act fast on emergent topics? With real-time speech analytics, call center supervisors receive alerts of critical trends and potential risks of churn to assist quickly. 

By addressing issues promptly, your team improves first-call resolution rates and increases retention, reducing customer frustration.

2. Delivering deeper analysis of calls, helping decision-making

Customer conversation can hold hidden insights – preferences, intentions, or frustrations. Using AI speech analytics, contact centers discover patterns and trends in spoken content, identifying the root causes of regular customer issues or complaints. 

Analytics and reporting provide a competitive advantage in decision-making and help your business create responses and offers tailored to clients.

3. Evaluating agent performance, assuring service quality

Constant evaluation of customer interaction quality drives agent training improvements. Speech analytics software automatically identifies areas for improvement in contact center performance and ensures compliance with customer service standards.

By monitoring metrics such as call duration and process adherence, your leaders update processes and personalize feedback, leading to higher first-call resolution rates and a more empowered team.

4. Offering an overview of operations, saving time and resources

Speech analytics allows call centers to streamline their operational processes, reducing costs and optimizing staffing levels for better resource allocation. 

With all your team calls covered by Echo AI, leaders monitor real-time metrics such as wait time, call handling, number of interactions, and peak periods, increasing team efficiency.

5. Providing insights to increase customer satisfaction

Happy clients become loyal to your brand, engage, convert more, and save customer service agents time. Speech analytics tools help your business provide personalized service, facilitating customer segmentation and engagement strategies that increase satisfaction rates.

With Echo AI, your team identifies customers' intentions categorized by tags, generating insights to act immediately on specific solutions, avoiding churn risk before it's too late.

How does speech analytics work?

Speech analytics works through a range of technologies, including automatic speech recognition (ASR) to convert speech to text and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze sentiment. Software with more advanced technologies, such as Echo AI, leverages machine learning and AI algorithms to expand functionalities, including identifying key topics and trends, analyzing sentiment, monitoring compliance, and diagnosing training needs.

Echo AI speech analytics software follows a well-defined process:

Before choosing a new platform to optimize your operations, remember that customers still value the human approach in every conversation. A survey by Statista indicates that 86% of consumers in the US consider it important or very important to contact a real person when communicating with a business.

With AI-powered speech analytics solutions such as Echo AI, your team unlocks valuable insights from the recorded calls, delivers personalized interactions, drives better agent performance, and ultimately provides first-rate customer experience.

Voice analytics use cases and metrics to inspire your customer service revolution

Nearly every industry where customer calls hold useful insights can benefit from speech analytics – from financial services to healthcare. And businesses are likely to invest in this technology. Analysts project the global market to surge to $5.1 billion by 2027, a 17.3% annual growth from 2022 to 2027.

Here are three strategic use cases, along with their respective metrics, to inspire you to drive more efficiency and revolutionize your customer service operations.

1. Boosting conversion rates on calls

Speech analytics software helps you map customer history, understand their intentions during calls, and analyze successful interactions that lead to conversions. 

Echo AI insights and functionalities support customer issues resolution, sales conversions, and renewing subscriptions, among other goals. With a better understanding of your client's needs, improving inbound and outbound customer engagement campaigns is easier.

Metrics to follow:

• Mentions of product or service interest

• Engagement with promotional offers

• Success in upselling and cross-selling

  
  

2. Improving agent adherence to sales scripts

Not sticking to sales scripts during calls can result in missed opportunities and lower conversion rates. Call center speech analytics software monitors how closely agents follow scripts and identifies key selling points that may be missing.

Echo AI automatically provides constructive feedback to agents and diagnoses why customers aren't making a purchase, maximizing your team's potential.

Metrics to follow:

• Script adherence rate

• Call to action rate

• Customer satisfaction score

  
  

3. Detecting operational slow-downs

Calls get stuck for technical reasons, high call volumes, or ineffective communication. With a speech analytics platform, your contact center gains a comprehensive view of operational delays, detecting training needs, customer frustrations, and other reasons that slow down the conversation.

Echo AI automatically scores calls based on agents' performance and customer sentiment, allowing team leaders to manually review high-priority interactions that need personal attention.

Metrics to follow:

• Average handling time

• Hold time analysis

• First call resolution rate

Analyze every single call with the best speech analytics software

As a powerful conversation intelligence software, Echo AI leverages AI-powered voice analytics to help businesses scale and become infinitely customer-centric. By processing and analyzing customer conversations in real time, Echo AI empowers you to effectively understand customers and extract high-value, actionable insights from every call.

Here's what Echo AI does in your customer service operations:

• Unifies omnichannel contact center processes: While speech analytics processes and reviews data from calls, Echo AI covers all types of interactions, including e-mail and social media channels, all in one place. Easy to instantly access insights and filter by the categories you need.
  
  

• Analyzes conversations with human-level depth: Using advanced NLP, Echo AI evaluates conversations with human-level depth. Prepare your team to improve personalized messages, address concerns properly, and proactively trigger customers with solutions or promotions to raise satisfaction rates.

  
  

• Automates manual call reviews: Echo AI evaluates and tags calls by different categories, helping your team prioritize solutions for critical conversations. Access insights about specific issues in seconds and streamline your workflow, focusing on more strategic tasks.
  
  

• Collect and connect your data with 30+ integrations: Echo AI integrates with dozens of tools, such as Hubspot, Salesforce, Zendesk, and Klaviyo. Easily sync and connect platforms with all the guidance you need for a quick implementation.

  
  

• Improves customer satisfaction and employee experience: If highly rated customer experience is the goal, employee experience leads to it. Our speech analytics software not only provides insights to increase customer retention and satisfaction but also boosts the performance of contact center agents with AI coaching, helping you retain and develop the best people.