Brands: How speech analytics can work for you

Kristina: We hear a lot about click metrics, eye movement metrics…what are speech analytics?

Matt Matsui, SVP, Product Strategy and Marketing, Calabrio: Speech analytics are designed to allow companies to gain insight from recorded calls with their customers. Conversations are captured, categorized, and then analyzed so companies can use the insights to make better business decisions such as adjusting marketing, sales, or product strategies. Audible customer interactions have a wealth of information about sentiment and wants, and speech analytics bring data structure to those conversations so companies can extract meaning and value.

Kristina: How are speech analytics gathered and how is this an advantage over other types of analytics?

Matt: Speech analytics are gathered by running call recordings through analytics engines (like phonetics or speech-to-text). Then keywords or phrases are identified and analyzed in order for the business to gain insight into their customers and even contact center employees. Speech analytics is unique, especially compared to other types of analytics. When customers are speaking, they aren’t necessarily filtering and forming conversations the way they would in an email, text message, or on social media. Speech analytics give companies access to in-the-moment reactions and sentiments because customers are using both contextual and functional words during conversations. Contextual words are the nouns and verbs used to formulate a sentence, while functional words are used to fill in the gaps. It’s actually those functional or “throwaway” words that give insight into someone’s subconscious, or his/her true feelings, and brands now have access to that insight. Because of this, speech analytics give companies a more accurate view of tone, context, and overall customer sentiment.

Krisitna: How are advertisers using speech analytics now?

Matt: Advertisers are using speech analytics in a few ways. They can track various keywords or phrases and attach it to campaigns to measure results and/or sentiment around a particular campaign. They can also measure tone and sentiment against call volumes during a campaign’s timeframe to see if it was successful in driving activity – and make adjustments accordingly. Brands can also track competitive mentions for competitive intelligence or to identify why their customers are leaving.

More from Matt and Calabrio next week, including how brands can implement a speech analytics strategy.