Speech Analytics and the Cloud: Customer Experience and ROI

by Emily Nave

The Ideal Investment

It wasn’t long ago that businesses were forced to manually score all sales and customer service calls to unearth valuable keywords and sentiment data. This was a very inefficient process—converting speech-to-text and identifying keywords and phrases was incredibly time-consuming, and often only a small percentage of calls would be screened. 

Now, highly sophisticated speech analytics software offer an array of services that enable enterprises to quickly make sense of these conversations, opening up more possibilities for understanding and improving the overall customer experience. Investing in speech analytics software is the best way for businesses and enterprises to ensure they remain leaders in their market and continue their journey to digital transformation.

a call center headset on a desk with analytics on top

Improve Service Quality

There are likely hundreds of thousands of minutes of calls going in and out of your organization on a daily basis. Buried within those conversations are countless pieces of data that can help you better understand what is working and what is not. Everything from product complaints to trends in reasons for calling lie within the information of each conversation. Speech analytics software is the key to unlocking that insight.

“The use of automated bots and enhanced contextual communications for business continues to grow, as does the demand for new and innovative ways to better engage with their customers for deeper relationships and more meaningful connections.”

Omar Javaid, chief product officer at Vonage.

When you adopt an automated speech analytics solution, you monitor both customer and agent interactions simultaneously. This opens up a myriad of opportunities for specialized coaching, script analysis, and workflow improvements. It can also help you spot particularly difficult interactions so you can anticipate similar calls and adjust toward a frictionless experience for all.

Additionally, analytic software can be trained to target key phrases and emotions elicited by the customer. This allows a business to analyze a customer’s mood, interaction, and overall satisfaction in real-time, allowing for quicker alternative strategy adoption.

Bolster Customer Retention

What can offer integral insights into sales conversions can also help to decrease your customer attrition rate. In a well regarded study released by Dimensional Research, participants ranked customer service as the top factor in gauging vendor trust. Additionally, 66 percent of B2B and 52 percent of B2C customers stopped buying after a bad customer service interaction. 

With a speech analytics solution, you can deter these bad consumer interactions by studying key words and phrases that lead to a positive experience for the customer. Furthermore, you can identify conversations that elicit negative responses and rework your strategy to avoid these altercations in the future.

So, what should you be looking for in these conversations? We have identified seven key categories of phrases that can help you decode customer calls. Anything from statements of opinion to the use of profanity can help you understand your problem areas and ensure customer retention in the future.

66% of B2B and 52% of B2C customers stopped buying with a company after a bad customer service experience

Increase ROI

The success of landing a sale are sometimes found in the nuances of sales calls. Aside from the identification of phrases and sentiment, much can be gleaned from the agent’s side of the conversation.

There are a few important tips to customer turnover using speech analytics that will get you ahead quicker. For example, through extensive call analysis, it was found that salespeople who speak for less than 50 percent of the call are more likely to close a sale. Success is also affected by the number of times that price is brought up—salespeople who discussed price three or four times (no more or less!) after establishing value during their pitch were more likely to close the sale.

These findings all come back to a common advantage of adopting a speech analytics solution: a greater return on your investment. The speech analytics industry has proven it’s worth time over time, and this is reinforced by the fact that every dollar earned during a monitored call can be directly traced back to the investment of the software.

“Because these [real-time speech analytics tools] are expensive, most early use cases were around revenue generation,” says Ian Jacobs, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “It’s a lot easier to justify the purchase if it’s generating revenue.”

Save Time & Money with Speech Analytics Technology

The investment in speech analytics technology provides a clear advantage to improving nearly all aspects of your business. It will save you time and money from countless hours of manual call analysis, help you improve your overall customer interactions and relations, and will have a near-direct impact on your ROI. Contact VoiceBase today for more information.

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