As the volume and use of data continues to skyrocket, businesses are discovering the benefits of leveraging speech analytics technology within their strategy. Speech analytics gives organizations new opportunities to identify and manage the valuable insights arising from conversations and to deepen their understanding of the customer journey.
According to Reports and Data, the speech analytics market will value at least $6.54 billion by 2028, with the new demands coming from customers and the growing focus on achieving excellent customer satisfaction and, therefore, driving revenue growth. Many industries are already witnessing the benefits of implementing speech analytics technology, such as telesales, internet entertainment services, product-based business and across many other verticals.
From identifying market trends to developing successful campaigns, speech analytics technology can be your ally in strengthening customer loyalty. Today, we will learn more about the advances and changes being made in this area, the exciting opportunities and the competitive advantages that this technology is unlocking within businesses.
What is Speech Analytics?
Speech analytics is a technological process that uses the power of artificial intelligence to understand, process and analyze human speech. It allows businesses to analyze audio data (recorded calls, video calls, conversations, etc) and extract relevant information to improve their service and customer experience.
To get a better vision of what speech analytics can do, we will break the process down into three typical stages:
1. Data Capture And Processing
The initial stage is when the audio data is first captured and processed. This first step will dictate the rest of your process and the quality of your final results, as capturing and processing audio data precisely will reflect on the end result of your transcription. It’s important to remember that data capture can relate to context that goes beyond speech itself – speaker tone, pauses, non-speech (such as laughing) and more are all an important part of data capture.
2. Analysis.
Next, the data that has been gathered is analyzed. This analysis will depend on the criteria which will be determined by the circumstances, the objectives and the desired insight outcomes. For example, if your analysis is linked to an audit or quality control procedure, you may be searching for specific target keywords within the context of a sales or support call. Equally, if you’re looking to gain insight into emerging trends or common issues, analysis of repeated topics and frequently occurring keywords can be helpful.
The analysis stage can also include the analysis of sentiment, inferred from two independent data points – the tone used in the conversation and the words spoken. This is particularly helpful for content translation destined for a “text to speech” outcome. A good example of speech analytics in practice comes when companies such as Netflix need to translate the script of an episode without losing emotional context or any nuances – taking speech to text and then text back to speech.
3. Reporting
Once the data is captured, processed and analyzed, the final stage is to turn the resultant findings into highly actionable reporting. This can take the form of summarization of audio content, speaker analytics (especially important within the context of meeting records), quality scoring, as in the case of sales or support calls, or more generalized statistics and findings that highlight the opportunity for development of products or services.
Why Are Businesses Turning To Speech Analytics Technology?
Companies are increasingly embracing the benefits of implementing speech to text for business. Leveraging speech analytics technology can drive enhanced customer experience across a wide range of verticals.
Speech analytics technology performs a vital role of capturing, processing and analyzing high volumes of audio data. Mastering this data is the secret key to top-notch customer experience and sales performance, as it provides a measurable and accurate vision of the quality of your customer journey. Speech data has so much (often untapped) potential here – helping businesses to understand their customers’ pain points and preferences – assisting them to continuously improve the quality of their delivery.
There is also a growing concern regarding compliance with regulatory requirements. The potential consequences for businesses getting this wrong puts pressure on ensuring transparency and accountability. The use of speech analytics technology can help to identify and mitigate the risks of penalties and investigations.
Let’s explore some of the practical ways that speech analytics deliver benefits in different areas of business…
1. Better Insight Into Customer Support
We live in the age of “customer-first.” As a result, businesses are increasingly leaning on speech analytics, to improve their customer support and to optimize their overall customer experience.
87% of executive leaders in the US and the UK acknowledge customer experience as their “top-growth” engine. Yet, only 1 in 3 feel prepared to address it. As a consequence, $35.3 billion is lost annually in customer churn by avoidable CX issues, such as poor customer service.
Although a lot of the customer service migrated to digital, such as chatbot interactions, phone line based support isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Companies should not underestimate the usability of the huge amount of data that is generated on support-based phone calls.
By accurately transcribing and analyzing these conversations, businesses can tap into this rich seam of data and every phone call can result in valuable insights. This data can be leveraged to gain insight from anything from keyword assessment through to sentiment analysis of the phone call. It is a great way to learn more about how your support calls are being received, giving the opportunity to improve in certain areas.
As an added bonus, by turning costly support lines into productive and valuable data sources, the expense of running manned call centres can be offset.
When leveraging AI transcription, human input changes from execution to the identification of mistakes. This means that working with subject matter experts, who are more likely to pick up on deviations and contextual errors, will drastically improve your final outcomes.
2. Improving Topline Through Improved Sales Process & Product Development
Data is the lifeblood of any business seeking continued growth and profitability. By tapping into the rich resource of speech analysis, businesses have the opportunity to grow revenue in a wide variety of ways, improving the sales process and fine-tuning their future product offering.
Generalizations drawn from support or sales calls are not enough to unlock truly trustworthy insight. The process needs to be intelligently automated at scale, in order to access significant patterns and trends. This is the opportunity that speech analytics unlocks – taking you beyond anecdotal evidence and into the realm of truly dependable data.
Sales calls represent a particularly pure form of data, and can highlight factors such as common blockers to conversion and trends within purchase intent. Analysis of emotional sentiment may give insight into patterns (especially problems) that would otherwise be missed in written communication (email, text message etc) which run the risk of misinterpretation.
One of the key benefits of tapping into this stream of data is that it’s pulled from a pre-existing source. Sales calls are already happening every day – instead of commissioning costly additional research, why not harness them to help make them (ultimately) more profitable and efficient via improved sales strategies, products and services?
3. Speech To Text For Business And Beyond – More Authentic Translation Of Content
If your business is dealing with content or entertainment services, speech analytics represents an opportunity to up-level your performance, at the same time as streamlining operations.
The exponential demand for programmed content shared via digital subscription and streaming services, such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, pinpoints the challenges of providing dubbed content. The organizations that offer this type of service must overcome the challenges of translating and re-recording their content to fit international audiences’ preferred languages, without losing tone, inference and the linguistics subtleties required to faithfully translate emotion, humour and more.
With 7,100 different spoken languages in the world, companies must put in a lot of work behind the scenes to adapt their audio content and offer high-quality services, accessible to global customers.
In a good example of speech to text for business, to deliver this service, content and entertainment organizations must first transcribe audio, then translate to provide nuanced scripts that voice actors can work with to produce new audio tracks faithful to the original content. One of the main challenges is to ensure that all emotional nuances and subtitles of the script (including innuendo, sarcasm, slangs, ironies, etc) are faithfully represented and not lost at the stage of the transcription.
Ensuring a high level of transcription is essential as a first step in this process. Artificial intelligence is key to making this procedure more cost-effective, but combining tech and human skills will give you the greatest results. The human in the loop (HITL) approach is a differentiator for optimized accuracy and to produce the best transcription results.
4. Understanding Agent Performance
We’ve already highlighted the potential that speech analytics holds when seeking a better understanding of our customers. However, speech analytics also represents an opportunity to businesses when it comes to understanding their sales and support agents – unlocking the potential to help them improve.
Organizations have the responsibility to ensure that their agents are fully supported and given access to all the resources they require in order to succeed. Not only based on their performance to customers, but also how engaged and satisfied they are with the organization. This should not be second-guessed by a business and speech analytics offers the chance to take a data-driven approach to ongoing support.
The use of speech analytics technology can help to shed light of the performance of sales, marketing and customer support agents and identify areas for improvement. Organizations can access data gathered at scale and rapidly spot any common patterns linked to less successful agents or even trends that can be replicated from your highest performers. This way, speech analytics can facilitate response optimization and ensure the support you give is both effective and applicable to a greater number of agents.
Speech analytics can also improve transparency between supervisor and agent. By having a data-driven approach, supervisors can have a more accurate vision of the team’s performance, which supports them to manage their teams more effectively and boost employee engagement.
5. Risk Mitigation Via Better Adherence To Legislation And Litigation Readiness
Further to improvements in the customer experience and employee engagement, speech analytics can be critical for businesses when it comes to adhering to legislation and being ready for any litigation.
The truth is, data not only provides more opportunities but also more responsibilities for businesses. Some of the recurring challenges with audio data include call script deviation, profanity, data leakage and risk of IP theft. Consumer data is a huge liability for any organization and businesses must take precautions to protect and ethically manage their data.
The number of data breaches has increased by over 200% in the last seven years, and 95% of cybersecurity breaches are caused by human error. These are some statistics that show how regulations are on the rise and why companies are vulnerable to fines and reputational risks. For example, the GDPR can fine companies up to 10 million euros due to data breaches. Thus, following regulation standards.
Regulations will only continue to increase, with penalties becoming more severe, especially for heavily regulated industries such as medical, banking, insurance, legal, etc. The best strategy going forward is to take proactive steps and invest in processes and technologies that can help ensure the best results as soon as possible, so companies can have the best ROI.
Speech analytics technology allows companies to manage large volumes of data in a safe and trustworthy manner. It helps to protect their customer’s personal data in case of any security preach and mitigate organizational risks associated with data breaches. For example, with speech analytics companies can quickly identify risky or problematic audio data in calls or meets, and take preventive measures.
Speech Analytics: An Untapped Resource For Your Business?
Speech analytics represents a truly exciting opportunity for businesses that are ready to proactively embrace the developing technologies, unlocking their potential. Even with the advances of digital communication, vocal data is a rich data source that companies can leverage to improve their current customer experience and take action to increase sales.
To achieve the best speech analytics results, investing in accurate transcription is the cornerstone of success. An accurate audio transcription influences all the different stages of the speech analytics process and will impact your final results for the better.
Investing in transcripts that are intelligently and accurately generated is key to success here. Those organizations which are able to produce scripts in a manner that can be dependably and cost-effectively scaled, in line with their business goals, stand to gain a real advantage, today and in the future.
If you want to know how to acquire fast and reliable transcription, learn more about how Bhasa can convert audio and video files into text quickly, easily, and with impressive accuracy.