Speech Technology: Mining the Information Gold Rush

Knowing there is gold in the hills is one thing, but extracting it is another. In the early stages of the 1800s gold rush miners used shovels, pick axes and brute strength. As mining evolved, miners implemented the use of water to simply wash away the earth. Water made extracting the gold a much simpler and less back-breaking process. Similarly, analyzing voice interactions is not a new process, but cloud-powered Speech Analytics has made the process easier and more efficient.

Utilizing cloud technology as the operations platform for contact centers has made analytics more accessible and easier to use than in the past. You might say the cloud is to analytics what water was to mining. The cloud increases the power of analytics and makes it more cost effective. Much like the miners of the 1800s, many companies are adopting this technology to unearth valuable customer insight. Quantifying why customers are calling is the first step to understanding how to better service them and, in turn, better prepare the agents. Speech Analytics enables us to dig deeper beyond why a customer called and better determine what a customer truly wants or needs.

Quality and speech technology are often paired together because it’s a very effective way to drive improved business practices. But, speech analytics is applicable in new ways such as opportunity identification. If an automated system can identify pre-determined keywords and phrases from written text and send the customer to the sales queue as a potential lead, why ignore the voice interactions? Automated surveys are a wonderful source of customer feedback, but what if the customer declines? They still left behind plenty of feedback during their agent conversation. Mine it, collect it, analyze and apply this information.

Analytics development powered by cloud innovations has made speech analytics solutions available to any contact center regardless of size or budget. For the small-to-medium size operation, inContact’s recent release of Discover WFO features the Discover Speech Analytics component which uses a phonetics-based engine to quickly locate key words and phrases contained within call recordings. It will identify opportunities for leveraging business intelligence, reducing risk and improving operation efficiency. As a phonetics-based system, Speech Analytics is able to identify opportunities beyond the typical key words and can hone in on non-standard words such as jargon, slang and even different languages.

For the larger, enterprise level contact center, inContact’s comprehensive WFO suite includes Analytics-Driven Quality powered by Verint® featuring LVCSR (large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition) technology to convert the conversation into text, and analyze the tone and pitch of the conversation. This conversion permits the interaction to be mined for intelligence and patterns, such as the automatic “categorization” of calls to identify those of potential high business value. Verint® has been a leader in the speech analytics space for a decade, bringing the power of their highly-advanced, field tested speech analytics engine and know-how to QM customers. Verint’s capabilities through the cloud bring the added benefits and cost savings of avoiding the heavy infrastructure and hardware investments that have long been associated with speech analytics and WFO, in general.

More companies are adopting a full customer experience perspective that ties quality management, analytics, and voice of the customer products. Speech analytics engines provide organizations with the power to search large volumes of audio for multiple terms of interest. Audio files containing the specific term(s) can be accessed quickly and easily. The ability to locate key phrases in continuous audio, combined with being implemented on a cloud platform, allows the gathered business intelligence to be shared throughout the entire organization.

The cloud is the key to bringing companies innovative solutions without breaking the bank. It offers the freedom to experiment with using analytics in different channels while only paying for services used. Operating on a cloud platform, featuring the agility of a pay-for-what-you-use approach, enables contact centers to mix and match various components to find the ideal combination of solutions. Taking advantage of cloud flexibility will help you unearth the right solution for your contact center needs.