The future of Speech Analytics technology

THE INNER CIRCLE GUIDE TO CUSTOMER CONTACT ANALYTICS BLOG: 7/7
ContactBabel recently published the ‘The Inner Circle Guide to Customer Contact Analytics’ which was sponsored by Business Systems. For those with a hectic schedule, we created a short series of blogs covering some of the main points highlighting the latest insights on speech analytics covered in the guide. Please find the final one in the series below.
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Taken straight from discussions with speech analytics technology vendors, we’ve summarised four areas where further development of the technology and application of it is expected in future.

Workforce Optimisation (WFO)

Vendors of full-suite WFO solutions are eager to point out the improvements speech analytics technology will offer to other elements of the workforce optimisation suite including agent performance and coaching tools. The ultimate vision is that 100% of calls will be monitored in all contact centres with the ability to create scorecards based on representative and accurate samples leading to more informed training techniques and agent development. The opportunity also exists to connect analytics, quality assurance and performance management so that information regarding areas like first call resolution for example, can be collected right down to agent level.

Emotion detection and voice biometrics

Accurately tracking emotions identified on customer calls can be a tricky process. No one person is the same with everyone expressing themselves uniquely. Analysing masses of recordings with a real time monitoring solution can ultimately help identify the agents, processes and circumstances where emotions run highest. This will allow organisations to spot the tell-tale signs of voice stress such as speed of speech and volume, providing more valuable insight into customer experience.

Usability and democratisation of analytics

According to many solution providers, simplifying and improving the usability of speech analytics is next on the list – increasing the likelihood of the solution being used by other departments such as HR (for hiring and candidate screening purposes). Alongside this, efforts are being made to encourage end-users to take full ownership and responsibility of their speech analytics technology investment. Much of this involves helping users build their own queries and making changes to their own system, moving away from the necessity of having a ‘technical person’ to mediate between them and their technology.

Customer Journey Analytics

Contact centres in the future are expected to be dealing with the more complex or emotive customer issues whereas simpler queries will be initiated primarily via online methods such as the company’s website or mobile app. As a result analysis of pre-call web activity will be recognised as a precious source of information into how effective the main portal of the business actually is, as well as providing greater insight into why customers are calling. The vision for speech analytics technology lies in being able to understand all stages of the customer journey, including where customers leave, the point at which customers decide to buy, where customers get confused and have to place a call into the business and the overall effort required by customers- these are some of the outputs customer journey analysis promises.

So there you have it – to name but a few we’ve selected four areas where an impressive amount of growth and development into speech analytics technology is going.

Download the full ‘Inner Circle Guide to Contact Centre Analytics’ here >