5 min
You know speech analytics is powerful, but are still not quite sure what it is or how it could help you?
Don’t worry — this article will explain how it works in simple terms and how it’s being used across the industry, helping you to decide whether it could add value to your contact centre.
1. WHAT IS SPEECH ANALYTICS?
Speech analytics is a form of artificial intelligence — a kind of virtual brain — that has been trained to understand human expression in order to extract key data from a conversation.
Depending on its design, it can carry out simple tasks, such as translating or summarising a conversation, or more advanced functions, such as detecting emotions or evaluating service quality.
2. HOW DOES SPEECH ANALYTICS ADD VALUE TO A CONTACT CENTRE?
Ever since the early days of call centres and the first attempts to measure customer experience, there has always been a supervisor or quality team manually listening to calls to assess service levels.
This was a slow, partial and fully manual task, and that’s how it’s been for years. Until speech analytics arrived.
This technology can analyse not only calls, but also chats, emails and WhatsApp messages — and it does so in real time.
It’s not just about saving hours of call listening time; it’s about automating service quality analysis in seconds.
Thanks to automatic transcription, speech analytics tools — such as our own Quality Monitoring service — can generate the following for every interaction:
- A headline summarising the reason for the call.
- A summary of how the conversation unfolded.
- A category defining the type of contact.
- An assessment of the customer’s emotional state (satisfied, neutral, or dissatisfied).
- A service quality rating from one to five stars.
All of this can be achieved with no human intervention. Best of all, this can be applied to every call.
3. 10 PROCESSES YOU CAN START AUTOMATING WITH SPEECH ANALYTICS DATA
Having all that data is great… but now what? How can you use it to improve your operations?
As the saying goes, knowledge is power. Here are just a few everyday tasks that become quicker and easier thanks to speech analytics.
3.1 IDENTIFYING RECURRING ISSUES
Every quality manager dreams of knowing their top 3 reasons why customers call.
Understanding which topics cause the most friction helps you design strategies to reduce these types of queries — and most importantly, detect early warning signs and alert the relevant teams before a small issue becomes a major problem.
How to do it?
Create categories for the different types of incidents you usually receive, including one for “cancellations” or “churn”. This allows you to filter conversations quickly and compare the volume of each.
💡 We recommend connecting this data to Power BI (or another dashboard tool) to visualise trends and spikes more easily.
3.2 COMPLIANCE MONITORING
A simple but highly valuable task: AI can automatically check whether agents are complying with GDPR and sticking to the required scripts.
How to do it?
Set your own service evaluation criteria using a star rating system. For example:
- 1 star: the agent greets the customer and introduces themselves.
- 2 stars: the agent also mentions the privacy policy.
- 3 stars: all of the above, plus identity is verified correctly.
- 4 stars: all of the above, plus the situation is clearly understood.
- 5 stars: all of the above, plus the agent checks if anything else is needed.
💡 Ideal for customer service teams in insurance, banking or healthcare.
3.3 AGENT PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
This data also allows you to identify which agent handles cancellations best or who has the strongest product knowledge.
It helps you develop training plans tailored to each team member’s real needs, and provide meaningful feedback.
How to do it?
Use the star rating system so the tool can evaluate agent performance automatically:
- 1 star: unfriendly, unresolved query, customer dissatisfied.
- 2 stars: friendly, unresolved query, customer dissatisfied.
- 3 stars: friendly, query resolved, customer shows no clear sign of satisfaction.
- 4 stars: friendly, query resolved, customer satisfied.
- 5 stars: friendly, issue fully resolved with no further actions needed, customer satisfied.
3.4 CUSTOMER SEGMENTATION BY SATISFACTION LEVEL
Since speech analytics can detect customer sentiment and tag calls and chats accordingly, you can generate a list of customers who were dissatisfied in the past month.
💡 This allows marketing and sales teams to take targeted action to improve retention.
3.5 IMPROVING CALL ROUTING
You can also work on continuously improving your routing system, whether it’s an IVR or a voicebot.
How to do it?
Cross-reference the call category with the queue it was handled by. You’ll quickly see if certain topics are landing in the wrong department.
3.6 IDENTIFYING PRODUCT OR SERVICE IMPROVEMENTS
This kind of insight is especially useful for product teams — and yes, it’s possible to uncover it.
How to do it?
If knowing which product is generating the most contact matters to you, set the model to always extract this detail and include it in the “category” field.
From there, you can filter all conversations by product/service type, and then narrow them down by those where the customer was dissatisfied. Review the headlines and summaries to detect any recurring issues with a specific product or service.
💡 Extremely useful for product management.
3.7 CAMPAIGN EFFECTIVENESS ANALYSIS
Just launched a new promo or changed your terms and conditions? You can analyse how it’s being received and whether agents are communicating it properly.
How to do it?
Train the model to detect when the campaign is mentioned and create a specific category — for example, “Summer Campaign”.
Then cross-check this tag with customer satisfaction scores to see how many conversations are linked to the campaign and which agents are handling them most effectively.
💡 Super useful for marketing and sales teams.
3.8 IDENTIFYING BEST PRACTICES
Just as you can detect problems, you can also find what works best: the right phrasing, tone or approach to resolve issues faster and more effectively.
How to do it?
Filter for conversations with maximum satisfaction (5 stars) and short resolution times. Then look at the summaries and agents involved to see if there are winning patterns worth replicating or incorporating into your scripts.
A GOOD PROVIDER MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE
To get real ROI from this technology, you need a provider who understands the industry and can support you in leveraging the data to get the insights you truly need.
You can contact our experts via live chat, call us on 900 670 750 or fill out the form below.
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