Speech Analytics Is Starting to Make a Difference
beginning to surface as an important new capability for outbound solution providers who need to demonstrate compliance with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
QA Gets an Overhaul
Companies have been doing quality assurance (QA) the same way since this technology was introduced close to 40 years ago. Vendors initially introduced and marketed these tools as a way to improve service quality, and they did not sell. Only after the vendors tied quality improvements to a reduction in call average handle time did adoption pick up. It became clear that companies would invest in contact center solutions that improved quality and the overall customer experience as long as they also improved productivity. So, although traditional QA is a manual process enabled by technology, companies invested in these solutions because they delivered significant quantifiable benefits.
Analytics-enabled QA takes this to a new level. Speech (and text) analytics can be used to identify a variety of calls (and emails, social media interactions, chats, etc.) where agents do not follow departmental policies and guidelines. As long as a company can build a rule to check and look for certain things, speech analytics can find and monitor it. There are still many things that speech analytics cannot check for and catch. While speech analytics can identify if an agent properly delivered the mini-Miranda or verified a customer at the right time, it cannot determine if the answer given is correct or not. However, considering that most companies only check three to five (and possibly 10) calls per agent per month, or just 1 percent to 3 percent of all calls, applying speech analytics to 100 percent of calls improves the odds of identifying behaviors that need to be changed, even if it cannot catch everything. And, as time passes, more sophisticated solutions are getting better at catching more things. So, while analytics-enabled QA is not perfect, it is better than the traditional way of doing quality assurance, which does not yield statistically relevant results for most companies that use it.
It's All About the Customer Journey
Companies are finally building multichannel (or omnichannel) and cross-channel servicing environments. Delivering a true multichannel contact center experience is very different from having separate groups of agents handle various nonintegrated media. Customers do not want to begin a transaction in one channel and start over when they move to a different channel. Customers rightfully expect a seamlessly integrated sales and service experience, whether they call, email, chat, or send a comment via social media.
Companies also need customer experience analytics to measure all "touches" in the customer journey, and speech analytics vendors have jumped at the opportunity to deliver packaged solutions. Vendors have started to offer integrated speech, text, and desktop analytics. Other vendors are combining speech analytics with surveying solutions to provide an internal and external view of customer satisfaction. DMG expects to see substantially more investments in these packaged multichannel analytics solutions during the next few years.
What to Expect in the Future
The speech analytics market has come a long way in a short time, and a great deal more is expected from it. Real-time speech analytics is in its infancy, but its potential is great, as it gives companies a new way of looking at and interacting with customers. More companies are going to integrate speech analytics with real-time guidance solutions to transform the way their staff handles customers. Speech, text, and desktop analytics will be integrated with predictive analytics solutions, and the output will be used to feed real-time guidance applications. More vendors are going to build customer experience analytics solutions that can capture and analyze customers' behavior throughout their journey, regardless of where they start and end. It's clear that speech analytics is useful on a stand-alone basis, but its value increases as it is integrated with other high-value applications and processes.
Donna Fluss (donnafluss@dmgconsult.com) is founder and president of DMG Consulting, a provider of contact center and analytics research, marketing analysis, and consulting.
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