Speech analytics

Speech analytics is the process of analyzing recorded calls to gather customer information to improve communication and future interaction. The process is primarily used by customer contact centers to extract information buried in client interactions with an enterprise. Although speech analytics includes elements of automatic speech recognition, it is known for analyzing the topic being discussed, which is weighed against the emotional character of the speech and the amount and locations of speech versus non-speech during the interaction. Speech analytics in contact centers can be used to mine recorded customer interactions to surface the intelligence essential for building effective cost containment and customer service strategies. The technology can pinpoint cost drivers, trend analysis, identify strengths and weaknesses with processes and products, and help understand how the marketplace perceives offerings.

Speech analytics provides categorical analysis of recorded phone conversations between a company and its customers. It provides advanced functionality and valuable intelligence from customer calls. This information can be used to discover information relating to strategy, product, process, operational issues and contact center agent performance. In addition, speech analytics can automatically identify areas in which contact center agents may need additional training or coaching, and can automatically monitor the customer service provided on calls.

The process can isolate the words and phrases used most frequently within a given time period, as well as indicate whether usage is trending up or down. This information is useful for supervisors, analysts, and others in an organization to spot changes in consumer behavior and take action to reduce call volumes—and increase customer satisfaction. It allows insight into a customer's thought process, which in turn creates an opportunity for companies to make adjustments.

Speech analytics applications can 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 in the contact center environment to identify calls from unsatisfied customers.

Measures such as Precision and recall, commonly used in the field of Information retrieval, are typical ways of quantifying the response of a speech analytics search system. Precision measures the proportion of search results that are relevant to the query. Recall measures the proportion of the total number of relevant items that were returned by the search results. Where a standardised test set has been used, measures such as precision and recall can be used to directly compare the search performance of different speech analytics systems.

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