Etech Global Services 
From manually listening to a handful of calls, to real-time monitoring 100% of customer interactions, call center quality assurance has come a long way. Rather than just being a function of listening to customer calls and rating agent behavior, contact center quality monitoring has expanded into becoming a strategic function which empowers customer service departments with actionable insights for improving customer experiences.
AI-powered speech analytics technology plays a pivotal role in the evolution of call quality monitoring. With the ability to uncover hidden insights, it enables brands to identify customer sentiments, monitor competitor behavior, conduct market research study, optimize sales efficiency, etc.
But how can you use speech analytics correctly to make a difference for your contact center? Below, we will discuss some key considerations and elements for implementing speech analytics in your call center.
Considerations for implementing Speech Analytics
Is your organization planning to transition into interaction analytics? Or are you facing challenges while implementing speech analytics? Here are some key considerations while adopting speech to text technology:
1. Build a Highly Scalable & Flexible Solution
The first consideration when creating a speech analytics solution is ensuring that it is highly scalable & flexible. From the type of call recordings, to effectively using it on a daily basis, organizations should map how effective their solution is with their existing technology landscape.
What kind of call recordings do you use? Mono, or stereo? For instance, stereo works well with speech analytics, since it easily distinguishes between two speakers. However, voice analytics work well with mono call recordings also. The final goal is that the solution should be easy to use and provide insights in the desirable format.
2. AI is not replacing Humans
Another key aspect that brands shouldn’t forget is that AI is not replacing humans. We will still listen to customer interactions. Artificial Intelligence is here to empower us by uncovering hidden insights and providing actionable data. Your human team needs to work with the technology to bring the best out of it.
3. Create speech analytics implementation journey
Planning the vision for interaction analytics implementation is a major area where any contact center must focus on. While procuring a new technology, change management is a critical aspect. You shouldn’t build something completely from scratch and tell your team to use it.
Instead, the speech analytics implementation journey should start small, with a single department, so that you can recap the findings and resolve the challenges discovered in the first step. Further, define the KPIs that will measure success of the speech analytics program. This helps you figure out whether your initiative is working well or not.
4. Data protection is the key
All customer interactions constitute sensitive customer information. In order to appropriately manage that information, get a buy in from your security team. Listen to their concerns about security & data compliance. Work with your speech analytics solution provider to resolve those challenges.
Most of the solution providers are compliant with common compliances such as PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, Audit Trails, HIPAA etc. Data protection is one of the key elements that shouldn’t be overlooked while implementing speech analytics.
5. Gear up for change management
Before you roll-out the speech analytics program for your call center, get buy-in from your team members. Explain to them the strategic importance of voice analytics and how it is going to make their day-to-day task easier.
Many digital transformation initiatives fail due to lack of user adoption. If you don’t want to fall in that bracket, ensure you effectively manage the change.
Key Components of a Speech Analytics Solution
The secret to a best dish is the ingredients in it. Similarly, the secret to a successful voice analytics program is the functioning of its key components in tandem with each other. Enlisted below are the key components and their significance in a speech analytics technology landscape.
Call Recordings
It all starts with audio recordings. Whether you’re capturing using a call recording software, or using any other method, it is vital to ensure that everything happens in real-time. The key to success here is ensuring that the recorder taps the calls directly into a telephony system.
This empowers your teams to guide agents at the moment when they need help. Your speech analytics implementation should be a unified technology landscape for streamlining call access, recording, ingestion and analytics.
Call Ingestion & Orchestration
This is the method of queuing and ingesting the calls within the automatic speech recognition platform. Identify the way you would use your voice analytics solution. Is it going to be real-time? Or will you opt for post call transcription? Maybe both.
There are multiple ways of automatically queuing the calls, via a custom API or connecting it with the call recording system. Identify the areas and how you would use the recordings, to then integrate with the solution.
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Technology
The ASR technology is responsible for measuring the accuracy of your speech analytics initiative. Therefore, it is vital when selecting the technology that provides a full package of necessary elements, including analytics in real-time with post-call transcription, identifying elements such as capitalization, punctuation, security features, numbers, multilingual support, etc.
In addition, best practices should be tuning in your ASR engine. This further empowers contact centers in identifying specific word accuracy instead of overall word accuracy. The specific word accuracy is more critical measures of identifying analytics.
Call Metadata
Metadata is the information that describes and summarizes a simple set of data. It is a critical part of your speech analytics initiative, as it simplifies tracking or working on the data. Although speech analytics works well by itself, the results could be further improved in combination with another set of data.
Learn how the prospective solution integrates data for delivering insights. Besides that, chart out the path for how to get these insights through the most important component, i.e., the Human intelligence that makes the real difference. Whenever you start working on the metadata, first bring all the data you have to the table and then work with your team to identify the most suitable data.
Quality Monitoring Software
A quality monitoring solution for call centers creates a remarkable difference when coupled with speech analytics software. It sits on top of the solution and simplifies analytics, agent performance evaluation, agent coaching, identifying opportunities & root causes etc.
The quality assurance software provides a complete overview of contact center performance and the areas that needs your major attention. This combination is a powerful approach to overall performance enhancement in your industry.
The People
People are the key differentiator in setting up any process. Hence, it is necessary to select the right speech analytics solution provider with good technology products and build an energetic team of analysts that make things work for you.
While you put this all together, it is necessary that the solution provider is having a vast experience of the functional perspective and not just technology. Because at the end of the day, contact centers are all about human conversations!
Why Etech for Speech Analytics?
Etech Global Services is a servant leader organization with over 20 years of experience in delivering remarkable customer experiences. We have a unique approach of handholding the customers while they embark upon their digital transformation journey. Our in-house team of data scientists possess experience in providing these services for a variety of different industry verticals.
Initially started as a call center, Etech has also ventured into providing speech analytics and call center quality monitoring solutions, such as QEval, making a remarkable difference for our partners and their customers. Contact us today to learn more about Etech’s services and how we can help you!
