Avaya announced its purchase of speech analytics firm Aurix to support its UC and contact center solutions. This acquisition indicates the growing need for companies to mine, analyze and understand their customers’ conversations. For too long contact center metrics focused on the agent’s conversation but were unable to categorize voice interactions of their customers to assess their concerns and attitudes. I believe it is an important shift for customer service organization to use speech analytics to better understand customers’ attitudes and improve their experience through analysis and interpretation of what they are saying. Speech analytics is ready for prime time and is an important tool to gain valuable customer insight. Benefits of speech analytics allow you to:
• Identify customer attitudes. By combining emotion detection with a conceptual interpretation of the conversation companies have a means to quickly determine customers’ viewpoints.
• Provide alerts on possible customer defections. Speech analytics identifies key phrases that suggest customer dissatisfaction and enables companies to respond to these issues to solve the customer’s problem and hopefully save the account.
• Capture new trends. A surge in calls on a particular topic may indicate new trends or customer interests. This gives companies a head’s up on what is on their customer minds, so they can respond quickly.
• Resolve problems quickly. Often when a problem occurs, it takes hours to days to get the attention of the business. This may cause costly setbacks as companies need to recover from a malfunction or product defect. Speech analytics can spot and address these problem areas in a fraction of the time and solve the issue before it becomes widespread.
• Increase sales revenue. By searching on key words or phrases that highlight a customer’s interest companies can introduce new offers or cross-sell accounts.
Avaya will join a number of vendors who sell speech analytics as a premise or hosted solution. Additional vendors offering speech analytics includes Nexidia, Nice, Verint and CallMIner. Adopters of this technology report that it not only saves operational costs it also improves their ability in improve customer satisfaction and reduce customer attrition by more quickly identifying causes for churn.
