Cake and conversation

How digital transformation and COVID-19 have cooked up a new era for speech analytics

There seems to be a resurgence of speech analytics going on all around us. Maybe this is linked to COVID-19, as many more conversations are taking place over phone, video or chat. Or perhaps this resurgence is just part of the wider process of business digitization. The reasons for its use in business appear to be markedly changing, however.

Once speech analytics was focused on compliance or agent performance management / quality management. Now it appears to have wider and deeper remit.

There is still a place for compliance and performance management, of course. However, the new drivers are more strategic and impact core business KPIs: reducing costs; improving revenues; and detecting broken processes that are invisible to the digital or automated channels of communication.

The building blocks have also radically changed. I am amazed at how many organizations are still looking for speech-to-text technologies. When asked “why do you want this?” they talk about the wider need of linking this intelligence to other data in their systems of record. This is valid, of course, and tremendous insights can be gained from these initiatives, but why start with the raw conversation?

It’s the old adage: if you want to bake a cake, you don’t buy a dairy, a mill and a sugar plantation. You buy the ingredients you need to bake a cake, not what it takes to make the ingredients.

The new wave of speech analytics solutions delivers topics, intent, question detection, summaries of conversations and much more, all out-of-the-box. These are the pure ingredients that the digital baker needs to bake their conversational intelligence cake.

More than ever before, organizations need to take advantage of the wider range of intelligence that these solutions provide. In this new normal post-COVID, where customers and staff are increasingly interacting via digitized channels, we must take care of all this additional data in a way that delivers useful and actionable insight. One thing is certain, agility and insight are rapidly becoming the most important tools in dealing with shifting customer needs.

Your speech analytics toolset should be able to deliver what you want or need without an issue. The point is that you should be able to choose and also be able to change your mind at any time: whether you want a bite, a slice or the whole cake.

Can your speech analytics toolset deliver this?
If you want to take advantage of the benefits that speech analytics can offer, why not get in touch?