The future and adoption of Speech Analytics technology

‘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 pinpoints its popular uses in terms of:

• Improving performance & quality
• Identifying demand failure (broken processes in place)
• Further investigating the voice of the customer

One of the many benefits of speech analytics for example, is that 100% of calls are able to be monitored across 100% of agents, allowing to isolate successful behaviours to be shared across agent groups. As a result, the training and coaching received by new agents can be far more effective as well as targeted, fast-tracking agents to a level of expertise in order to reduce attrition and improve performance & quality.


Another benefit of Speech Analytics technology, is that it will allow you to accurately catalogue thousands of hours of recordings, helping categorise those calls with regular references to your competitors and their pricing for example, correctly capturing the voice of the customer for further analysis and informed business insight.

Martin goes on to state confirming our view, that speech analytics technology, (although adoption may have been slow) is presenting itself on many organisations’ roadmaps and within the top quartile for investment, predicting a rise in deployment within the next 12 month period.
Although organisations claim to be using speech analytics, Martin goes on to talk about differentiating the different ‘versions’ of the technology including ‘industrial strength models’ which can analyse huge call volumes and provide meaningful results in a business-intelligible format and those organisations using ‘real time’ identifying keywords and phrases that advisors should be citing throughout the conversation. This process, as Martin mentions is another way of carrying out automated quality assurance.

Martin prompts us to consider that those organisations who have begun to embed speech analytics into their organisation are now harvesting different capabilities and opportunities particularly as the voice of the customer grows and new ways of empowering frontline staff intensifies.
Confirming our views in the importance of not just ‘buying’ speech analytics, but actually embedding the technology into the culture of an organisation, Martin talks about viewing speech analytics as just a tool in finding opportunities. It is the end user ultimately who needs to transform these potential opportunities into something tangible, ensuring the value from the investment is distributed across the business contributing towards an ethos of continuous improvement.

Martin also goes on to mention those organisations using speech analytics in ‘real time’, looking to identify keywords and phrases advisors should be using during customer interactions at that point in time. Designed to improve the customer experience, the use of this technology is also another way of carrying out automated quality assurance by ensuring agents are saying and doing the right thing.