Speech and Interaction Analytics

Contact centres are no longer just cost centres - they're goldmines of actionable insight. And in 2025, forward-thinking customer contact leaders are discovering that the most untapped resource in their operations isn’t in headcount or tech—it’s the conversations they’re already having.  Welcome to the era of interaction analytics.  With the power to transform how you forecast, schedule, coach, and understand your customer needs, interaction analytics is quickly becoming essential to Workforce Engagement Management. From identifying hidden demand drivers to optimising...

How well do you actually know your customers? I’m talking about understanding each and every part of their purchasing journey. What frustrated them? What made them happy? Which part made them buy from you in the first place? If you can answer these, you’re way ahead of the curve, because  according to Microsoft, 53% of consumers believe their feedback doesn’t go to anyone who can act on it. From my experience of working in multiple contact centres, understanding customer intent...

Analysing the human voice, can help unearth the root cause of experiences, concerns, problems, reduce costs, identify key behaviours, and better understand the client’s perspective. Integrated Care 24 (IC24) are a great example of how this works in action. Using transformative digital tools and applications, IC24 helped elevate the patient's voice through the use of Speech and Text Analytics. Analytics technology has been available for organisations for a good number of years. However, many organisations have struggled to embed this...

In the early 2000s when automation first started gaining momentum, call centres businesses saw it as an opportunity to reduce costs and improve agent efficiency and less about improving customer experience. However, this business logic has changed over the years as businesses now deem customer experience as the most important reason for investing in call centre automation. The change of mindset has been a result of two megatrends that have reshaped the business world for good. Firstly the widespread adoption...

Speech Analytics (also known as Interaction Analytics) is the process of analysing customer interactions to help spot trends and patterns. Speech Analytics is a popular call centre software solution. The technology can analyse different types of customer interactions including social media, email, text and web chat. One of the key benefits of using Speech Analytics is to improve customer satisfaction as well as agent performance.  How does Speech Analytics work? By taking large volumes of unstructured raw data, such as...

Guest Blog - Rachel Auer, Product Marketing Manager, Calabrio - USA In the era of big data, data is everywhere! But accessing and using this data can be tricky, and that’s where analytics can become a vital tool. So, we teamed up with our partner Business Systems to host a webinar around this popular topic (to catch the webinar replay, click here >) For those who couldn’t make it, here’s a re-cap of the session! Firstly, let’s start with a...

Our latest webinar, ‘Top Tips for Combating Challenges in The Contact Centre’ was packed with an array of knowledge, best practice techniques and even a very good list of suggestions on what to watch next on Netflix, thanks to our audience contributions! (Tiger King it is then!). To catch this webinar on-demand, check out this link:Top Tips for Combatting Challenges In The Contact Centre During COVID-19 Here are the top takeaways from the day: Demand V Customer Service COVID-19 has...

Voice will always be a powerful data set for organisations. Voice conveys context, emotion and sentiment providing you with actionable intelligence. Voice is powerful. However, IT leaders could be missing a trick when it comes to this, as not all organisations are recording every interaction and for some the majority of voice data, is not easily accessible. Collecting voice data is half the battle. Tapping into insights which voice data can provide you with is a whole other beast. According...

It has become apparent that customers interact with organisations in more ways than ever before - email, social media, instant messaging and mobile are just a few in an increasingly growing list. On average, almost six different channels are used during the lifecycle of each customer relationship. With evolving technologies, these channels are bound to increase even more. The financial services industry is no different. Communications between traders and their clients inevitably span across multiple channels, with voice (fixed or...

Contact Centre Managers face a real challenge when trying to reduce cost in the contact centre.  Maximising each and every customer interaction as well as keeping the day to day operation of the contact centre running, requires an almost genius balance of workforce planning, productivity, quality and efficiency in every day processes. So here are our top 4 ways technologies help contact centres reduce cost without compromising on quality: 1) Workforce Management Workforce Management (WFM) enables workforce planners to automate the...

In an effort to comply with ever-tightening regulations such as MiFID II, Financial Institutions have re-focused their efforts on expanding their compliance teams as well as investigating already established technologies, such as Speech and Text Analytics. This technology has proven to be extremely useful in: Preventing issues from escalating by providing the necessary means to search proactively through recordings for ‘high risk’ keywords and phrases Supporting compliance by quickly finding and retrieving calls requested by regulatory bodies In light of...

As the New Year slowly creeps in, we thought it timely to update our article ‘Top 6 technologies that will drive recording compliance in 2017’, and look at it from a 2018 perspective. We’re excited about 2018. The FIFA football world cup is happening and, according to experts, Mars will be making its closest approach to Earth since 2003. Some exciting events to look forward to. And, let’s not forget MiFID II in January. As regulatory frameworks within the financial...

Business Systems’ Tim Thurston explains how Interaction Analytics can be used to help comply with the ever tightening regulations within the financial services Industry. Why is the adoption of Interaction Analytics gaining momentum within financial services? In an effort to comply with the ever tightening regulations such as MiFID II, MAR and many others, Financial Institutions have re-focused their efforts on expanding their compliance teams as well as investigating already established technologies to help them on their compliance journey. One...

The mis-selling of Payment Protection Insurance was the first to highlight a need for banks to improve monitoring of customer-agent interactions to ensure compliance was being upheld. Moreover, after the 2008 global financial crisis, consumers have became more aware and open to complain about the service being delivered when and if they feel they are being miss-sold too. Figures published by the FCA regarding consumer complaints in 2018, show how important it is for banks to re-engineer the way they...

[Updated Dec 2019]Contact Centre Managers can face a real challenge when it comes to them trying to reduce cost in the contact centre. To make the most out of every customer interaction requires a balance of productivity, quality and efficiency in day to day operations. Here are our top 5 technologies that can help reduce cost in the contact centre without compromising quality in 2020: 1. Reduce Cost in the Contact Centre with Workforce Management Workforce Management (WFM) technology allows...

Top 6 technologies that will help achieve the required levels of recording compliance for 2017 and beyond.

If the role of technology in business sustainability across sectors is still questioned, the recent report from Marketforce, titled “The Future of General Insurance 2016”, sums it all up. And although the survey is for the Insurance sector, the conclusions have a much broader application. According to the report, 80% of the respondents believe that ‘digitally-enabled new entrants will gain market share through differentiation on factors other than price’. Haven’t we seen this already materialising in the Banking sector? And...

Leaders in customer service are well aware that every customer contact can impact their contact centres bottom line. It is for this simple yet important reason that call quality is increasingly highlighted and monitored within contact centres. Today’s Quality Monitoring (QM) programs however, do not come without their faults, where some of the processes and corresponding functionalities to support these incentives are often outdated. In a market that is rapidly changing due to increased customer expectations, Speech and or Interaction...

Facts: A recent study at the University of Michigan suggests that attention and short-term memory processing are directly affected by a person's surroundings and environment, with noisy environments reducing significantly memory performance The human brain can only hold about seven pieces of information for less than 30 seconds. With those two facts in mind, one can only imagine how tough it can be for call handlers in the police force to gain a comprehensive understanding of the situation and pick...

‘Winning the war’ in terms of speech analytics technology awareness We catch up with Martin Hill-Wilson, Customer Engagement and Digital Business Strategist at this year’s Institute of Customer Service Annual Conference, where he shares his views on the latest in the future and adoption of speech analytics technology. A key point which Martin makes is that organisations are still unsure where exactly speech analytics technology fits into the everyday operation of the contact centre. Although it has many applications, Martin...

With the speech analytics market gearing up to be worth $1.33 billion by 2019* the vast potential for this technology is strikingly high. With plentiful room for growth, which sectors are more inclined to implement speech analytics in their organisation? Here we share some interesting insights taken directly from the ‘The Inner Circle Guide to Customer Contact Analytics’ the must read guide for any organisation looking to implement speech analytics - published by ContactBabel and sponsored by Business Systems. Speech...

[Last Updated: January 2017] THE INNER CIRCLE GUIDE TO CUSTOMER CONTACT ANALYTICS BLOG: 2/7 'The Inner Circle Guide to Customer Contact Analytics' (published by ContactBabel and sponsored by Business Systems) highlights the latest insights on Interaction (including speech analytics) technology. For those with a hectic schedule, we created a short series of blogs covering some of the main points covered in the guide. Please find the second in the series below. ********************************************************************************* Depending on the type of business, the issues...

A recent guide released by Contact Babel on Customer Contact Analytics cites one of the key drivers for uptake of speech analytics being fine avoidance and compliance with legal regulations. Certainly one of the key sectors we are now starting to see some significant growth in is the financial services and trading floor space. Particularly within those organisations governed by the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA). The DFA has enabled regulators to issue trade reconstruction requests, where they want to look more...

There was a lot of shared insight at the webinar we hosted back in May with Call Centre Helper and one of the stand out points for us was the recognition of the rise of the multi-channel contact centre yet the lack of monitoring going on across those channels. According to an audience poll during the webinar only 15% of the audience monitored web chat and only 22% monitored social media - interesting statistics. Understandably, there is just not enough...

[Last Updated: September 2016] Still not bought into the whole speech analytics hoopla? Not totally convinced by the massive investment required to get it up and running in your organisation? Fear not, you are not alone and to counteract this, vendors are starting to get a little bit more creative by offering up Speech Analytics as a managed service. This approach allows organisations to investigate a specific issue or area without investing in any analytics hardware or software and puts...

It’s time to move away from the long held belief that speech analytics is costly and difficult to implement. A number of entry level audio analytics packages are now available on a competitively priced licence basis, resulting in upfront costs you can effectively budget for. Implementation is easier in these stripped down versions which centre around key word search functionality as a means to pinpoint specific calls for compliance checks, fact verification, dispute resolution and quality monitoring. Much of the...

Experian is a leading global information services company providing consumer information, credit services, decision analytics and marketing services to customers. The Nottingham based contact centre deals with customer enquiries handling around 200,000 calls per month across 270 agents. Here we delve deeper into how speech analytics helped Experian achieve their retention goal. A high proportion of calls relate to the CreditExpert product, an online monthly subscription service which helps customers manage their credit report and score and also offers identity...

With more and more companies looking to benefit from Speech Analytics the question of: ‘how best to implement the project’, is very much a topic of current conversation and from our experience the answer is: – ‘build your own A-Team’ with Speech Analytics best practices. Bearing in mind that this is probably your first foray into Speech Analytics, this is going to be new ground for all concerned; so here we cover off some important points to help you on...

Recent controversies surrounding the mis-selling of Payment Protection Insurance have highlighted a need for banks to improve monitoring of customer-agent interactions to ensure compliance to regulations. In addition, the recent global financial crisis has led to greater consumer wariness of banks and increased likelihood to complain about services received. Making the case for customer interaction monitoring Against this backdrop and with finance-focused consumer interest groups highlighting where the best deals and service can be found, an environment has been created...

Increasingly, call centre outsourcers are turning to technologies like speech analytics to drive value in their contact centres through revenue generation and improving the quality of their services. The growth in this historically recession-proof sector has increased competition, making it important for an outsourcer to stand out from the crowd. Using analytics to demonstrate industry sector knowledge Research (from the CBI Market Information Database) shows that call centres that offer industry-specific expertise are at a particular advantage at this time...

Although a monopolised market, the budgets of water and sewerage companies are at the mercy of their performance. Ofwat (The Water Service Regulation Authority) uses the recently created Service Incentive Mechanism (SIM) as a measure of the quality of service provided by the water and sewerage sectors of England and Wales. The prices that water companies are permitted to charge their customers are a reflection of their performance on these measures; a company providing a good service to their customers...

How much real business insight can you get from your customer interactions?A wealth of data lies at your fingertips, trapped inside the thousands of phone calls that your agents have with your customers every day. How can you tap into this? Using manual call listening, you are unlikely to ever reach a level of analysis possible to make the time and effort put into this technique worthwhile. You are probably more likely to win the lottery than you are to...

Effective debt collection is a tricky balancing act between collecting revenue and avoiding spending more time or money than is necessary to do this. Speech analytics provides a vital window into the interactions between agents and debtors and helps collection agencies identify where changes need to come from to give them a leading edge when competing for portfolios and collection accounts. Keeping your agents working towards the highest return on every phone call Speech analytics can help debt collection agencies...

It is rare for a contact centre to have no requirement for sales expertise within their calling teams. Even discounting outbound telesales calls, a wide variety of industries court potential sales opportunities over the phone on a daily basis. Without effectively identifying and exploiting these, you could be missing out on significant annual revenue. Today’s post illustrates how speech analytics can help you to define, promote and monitor sales within your contact centre. Using speech analytics alongside agent monitoring and...