Speech Analytics - Discussion and Approach

- Business Goals are Driving the Growth of Speech Analytics

- The Speech Analytics Solutions Playing Field

- Dangerous Assumptions

- Implementation Issues to Manage

- Why Use Listening Methods?

Speech analytics offers a foundation for a contact center operations, customer market research and employee performance solutioms.  Its value is unique - much of this information cannot be capturing any other way than by manual call audits.

Seemingly simple, in truth speech, analytics is a complex, statistically-based technology.  It requires knowing the technology, using a rigorous methodology, understanding the results and spending effort on user adoption. It requires ongoing maintenance and upgrades in order to maintain accuracy.

Justifying the initial investment may not be easy – doing ad hoc call queries and creating call categories (which are not accurate counts of the proportions of calls in each category) is exciting.  But when trying to quantify the business value, specify the ROI and create a funding proposal, one quickly realizes that many of the features presented by vendors do not justify the investment.

Business Goals are Driving the Growth of Speech Analytics

Business goals supporting the growth of the speech analytics market include the need to:

• Have accurate, automated approaches for capturing contact reason codes
• Capture high value customer feedback by marketing and sales departments as well as upper management
• Continuously improve revenues through sales process analysis and employee adherence
• Drive additional value from customer contact center resources by becoming a corporate-wide marketing research resource

The technology can play a unique, dominant role in capturing data for reports, dashboards and enhancing the value of quality monitoring in customer contact centers.  In addition, there are emerging technologies enabling the recording of customer interactions for retail stores and branch offices, also supported by speech analytics.

The Speech Analytics Solutions Playing Field

Speech analytics is the foundation for a range of business analytics solutions.

To see examples of reports, dashboards and solutions that can be created using speech analytics combined with metadata, contact Listening Methods.

Dangerous Assumptions

There is a high degree of confusion concerning what speech analytics is, what it can do and what it can't do. The table captures the most important elements of mis-information that tends to circulate.

The consequence of not addressing these issues is time wasted on non-critical solutions, implementations that provide ambiguous data , users who reject the solution when they begin to understand its statistical nature and see the error rates, and lack of user adoption.

Listening Methods addresses these and other issues when implementing speech analytics solutions.  There is no question that one can get high value information that improves corporate bottom line performance, employee performance and leverages the role of the customer contact center into a strategic partner in a company.

Implementation Issues to Manage

The diagram shows the concepts to understand and manage when capturing the expressions (phrases and words) are the foundation of a speech analytics implementation. One must account for errors, ambiguity and the range of expressions to capture. A good implementation balances these factors:

• Errors due to words and phrases that have not been put in solution (Coverage)
• Errors due to missed words and phrases that are in speech analytics solution, but were missed by the software (Recall)
• Correct - Captured the words and phrases correctly (part of Precision)
• Ambiguity Errors - Captured the words or phrases correctly, but the meaning is wrong due to ambiguity
• Speech Recognition Errors - Captured words or phrases that are wrong (part of Precision)

To manage this well and provide a solution received enthusiastically by users requires understanding and managing these factors.

Why Use Listening Methods?

Companies find Listening Methods consultants of value for many reasons:

• Implement across multiple vendor platforms (Verint, Utopy, Nexidia, Recordant, CallMiner, NICE, etc.)
• Knowledgeable across the range of disciplines in speech analytics, contact centers, marketing, sales and business analytics
• Resources quickly create solutions that address business goals
• Frank about the behavior, capture rates and role of speech analytics
• Methodology for obtaining accurate data
• Willing to use additional data, for instance captured via CRM queries, to dramatically increase quality of results
• A focus on automatically obtaining as much data as possible
• Knows when highly select manual audits are appropriate to get the best data
• Cost effective services

Listening Methods Approach