Who need speech analytics technology?

Speech Analytics is a term used to describe automatic methods of analyzing speech to extract useful information about the speech content or the speakers.

One use of speech analytics applications is to spot spoken keywords or phrases, either as real-time alerts on live audio or as a post-processing step on recorded speech. This technique is also known as audio mining. Other uses include categorization of speech, for example in the contact center environment, to identify calls from unsatisfied customers. Speech analytics technology may combine results from different techniques to achieve its
aims. For example knowledge about where certain keywords were spoken in a customer telephone conversation could be combined with knowledge about which speaker (customer or contact center agent) spoke the words and perhaps knowledge of how often the two speakers were talking at the same time as each other.

Speech Analytics in contact centers can be used to extract critical business intelligence that would otherwise be lost. By analyzing and categorizing recorded phone conversations between companies and their customers, useful information can be discovered relating to strategy, product, process, and operational issues. This information gives decision-makers insight into what customers really think about their company so that they
can quickly react.
Source: wiki


Speech analytics technology providing organizations with insight into sales, service and products pulled not just from call center reports but truly from the voice of the customer. Yet it has also brought a dilemma for organizations deploying it. Who should really own speech analytics? Does it belong under the management of the contact center? Marketing? Analytics/business intelligence (BI)? It's a question organizations need to
consider when they're purchasing speech analytics tools.

Essentially, there are four ways for an organization to purchase speech analytics. Vendors that have developed speech analytics typically promote just the core speech analytics functions, parsing recordings for meanings, establishing patterns and alerting users to unseen connections. In the contact center, agent performance optimization vendors are pushing the technology from the workforce optimization side. Speech analytics
are a way to measure agent skills and train them.

outsourced call centers are bringing speech analytics to the attention of their clients as an add-on service. There is a disconnect between what speech analytics could do in theory and what it is actually being used for, speech analytics is not very different from other forms of analytics in that it provides insight into unseen patterns or hidden data connections.

People who run contact centers have traditionally worked in operations silos and are often tasked with cost control. They need to learn the language of profits and revenue. They're going to have to collaborate with business people who don't care about the activities in the call center -- they care about the outcomes.

Today's questions about speech analytics are indicative of a larger trend, he added. Increasingly, technology purchasing for the contact center needs to extend beyond IT. In fact, that began 10 years ago with the emergence of Internet protocol in the call center. As speech analytics and other channels emerge in the contact center, purchasing processes need to reflect that changing environment.

What has to happen over time -- and what will happen in forward-thinking centers that will become the leading edge -- is they have to knit their contact center management with the realm of traditional analytics as well as CRM, networking and telephony. Then you'll stop seeing the distinction between speech analytics and a broader overall analytics category that combines information from the contact center with other relevant streams.
That's going to change the nature of management structures that oversee the contact center over time.

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