Speech Analytics Going Mainstream

Speech Analytics has been around for a long time within contact centers but less than 5% of contact centers out there leverage this technology. Based on the latest survey conducted by SuccessKPIs, more than 80% contact centers find speech analytics useful. That’s a huge gap between a ‘business need’ and actual ‘market penetration’. There are various reasons for this:

Accuracy – Traditionally vendors have relied on technologies like Nuance for speech to text conversion and then build linguistic models on top of it. Today, Amazon not only has made it less expensive for a vendor to offer this service but also with better accuracy through AI driven services. And its only getting better every passing day.

Time & Cost – It was always considered an elite product meant for rich businesses. Most of the cost was partly driven by the cost of underlying components but most importantly due to lack of a solid business model. Server-less architecture, multi-tenancy and leveraging amazon services have brought the cost significantly down. Can old players adopt these themes? If yes then how fast? That is yet to be seen.

Business Intelligence Integration – All the customers we have talked to want to blend speech analytics data with that of IVR and Contact center. Most of the vendors talk about supporting BI Tools but yet again fail to offer this integration out of box. When it does come, it comes with big price tag and long time to deploy.

Call to Action – What do you do as a business when a specific topic or phrase is found? Well, most of the platforms would probably tell you the calls on which a specific phrase or topic is found but we need to take it to the next level where customers could take automated actions based on some rules. If a customer is likely to churn, a task should be created in Salesforce and automatically assigned to the respective Account Rep.

Focus on business outcome – Most of the current vendors who have focused on technology and business outcomes are mostly left to marketing. What is really needed is to bake the business outcome into the product. If a customer is looking to drive down the Churn or improve Agent Performance, product should allow them a quick way to get there in a few clicks and not months of deployment and tuning.

So if you are looking to leverage speech analytics for your business and hit the ground running, there is no better time to do that. Speech Analytics is indeed becoming mainstream, thanks to vendors like SuccessKPIs and Amazon.