4 Ways Speech Analytics Software Benefits Customer Support Contact Center Owners

It can be difficult to know where to begin when looking to make changes to your business. For a start, there are no guarantees – no matter how well-thought-through a modification is – that any changes you make will even have the desired effect.

You can have the best new broadband technology in place, the best video conferencing solution for a remote-working setup, or have a product that has been focus-group-tested to within an inch of its life – and still fails.

In a world where this is a reality, the more concrete information you can get your hands-on, the better. In a digital age, it’s no surprise to learn that improvements and advances in analytics of all kinds are being made.

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These analytics cover a lot of ground on the customer journey. They can tell you who your target audience should be, how effective a marketing campaign has been, and how our audience likes to interact with your business. All of this is useful, especially in a world where remote working as customer support in a cloud contact center is becoming closer to reality.

An area that companies don’t tend to have as thoroughly covered is analytics built around their existing customer base. This is where speech analytics software comes in.

What Is Speech Analytics?

Before we look into how speech analytics software benefits your business, let’s first make sure that the main terms are understood. “Speech analytics” refers to technologies that are designed to extract data from digital conversations, and isn’t quite the same as interactive voice response.

These “conversations” can be born from either live or written speech. In a contact center setting, this means that they can be used across all contact formats; from call recording to email exchanges, video calls to live chats. The benefit of the best of these technologies is that they can track conversations in real-time.

How Is It Used?

In a contact center setting, the fact that speech analytics software can be used in real-time makes their appeal even greater. Using them in this way means that contact center owners can source data across a lot of different verticals and points of interest.

From behavioral analysis to conversational quality management, speech analytics software offers a handy tool in your team management toolbox. It allows for performance reviews and group training that is based around real-time accounts of customer-advisor interactions.

Speech analytics allows you to champion your best performers more effectively. And can isolate experiences to learn from and improve upon with more accuracy. But this is just one way in which speech analytics software could be used to help improve your relationship with your client base.

Below, we highlight the four most common ways in which these technologies can change how you help your customers. In doing so, we’ll also acknowledge the long-term benefits that this can have on business performance.

1. Reduced Customer Churn

When we talk about customer churn, it’s important to first understand what exactly it is. Customer churn refers to the rate at which customers stop engaging with a company and take their money elsewhere, the opposite of customer loyalty. In catastrophic cases, this can happen to companies with a large public following. In the days of social media, this can cause a lot of damage to a company’s bottom line.

The aim for most businesses is to have a churn rate that is as low as possible. Ways to do this include providing a product or service that has a good reputation among a sizable chunk of your target audience. Another element to reduce churn in this digital age is to have a website that functions at the speed and with the simplicity that customers expect.

An often overlooked yet vitally important element in keeping your churn rate as low as possible is how efficiently your company rectifies a situation whereby something has gone wrong. With almost a third of all customers saying that they would look elsewhere after just one bad experience with a company. Getting this element of your service spot-on can have wonderful effects on the long-term health of your business.

So, how does speech analytics software help? In recording all conversations that customers have with advisors, speech analytics software allows you to recognize any patterns behind customer churn more readily and efficiently. This means that making necessary changes to an area of your business that customers are reacting badly to is also a quicker, more hassle-free experience.

Plugging the holes in your current business value proposition with more speed and comprehension than before means that any issues are likely to have less of an impact. This creates a lower churn, and ultimately seeing your turnover and profits increase.

2. Improved Customer Experience

It isn’t just the customers on the verge of leaving you that speech analytics software helps, however. It can also positively affect those who are currently happy with the product or service that you provide them.

Well set up analytics software can not only identify areas that customers don’t particularly like about your current business but areas that they do like too. As well as this, these technologies can be used to highlight common interests in your customer base that are being provided for elsewhere.

This allows you to recognize potential areas for expansion for your own business and beyond.

Using technology to identify individual’s areas of interest online is nothing new – cognitive automation used in this area is only going to grow. Using speech analytics software in this way is a more risk-averse way of understanding this data that can still deliver incredible results for you.

3. More Personalization

As well as providing improvements to service on a general level, speech analytics software can allow a business to provide a more tailor-made service to their customers, something that historically has been managed by customer experience software. It may be assumed that this will lead to greater costs and smaller profit margins, but this isn’t always the case.

The data that these analytics deliver to a company can help your ability to make bespoke offerings to individual customers. Based on whichever criteria you wish – from all-time sales to reviews left on the site – customers can receive offers or gifts as per their own needs. This not only puts the control over great service more actively in your remit as a business but bridges the gap of providing a digital service that is as personable as a physical one.

4. Greater Cost Effectiveness

Whilst we all want to make sure that the customer base we have is happy with our operation, we also love to find more cost-effective ways of doing this. In many areas, these two factors are at odds with one another, as most of the time, to provide better quality through better CRM systems, you have to pay more.

With speech analytics software it doesn’t have to be this way. It can very much be a case of having your cake and eating it too. So, how does importing a new technology into your day-to-day operation make everything cheaper?

The key here is to look at the long-term picture. In the same way that the profits gained from the above benefits only continue to grow over time, the shift to speech analytics delivers a higher profit margin in the same manner.

This is done by reducing the areas of your business that speech analytics identifies as being inefficient. For example, when viewing the data collected by speech recognition en masse, a business can see whether its entire product range is of value, or if cuts need to be made.

Similarly, this technology can identify if there is unnecessary baggage in your customer service pipeline. It all feeds into a data set that can be the deciding factor in your business rising above and beyond your competitors.

Conclusion

Throughout this article, we’ve not only defined what speech analytics is, and shown the different ways in which these technologies can revolutionize your company from a contact center owner’s perspective.

When used correctly, these analytics can discourage customers from looking elsewhere both by improving reactive customer service and proactive customer loyalty programs. As with all analytics, the real key to making them as effective as possible is being able to interpret them well.

As long as you have the personnel available to do so, it seems that speech analytics software is an almost essential part of how the world of business can progress.