How does speech analytics work?

You’ve set up your call tracking software, but can you work out who wants to buy and who is simply making an enquiry? With speech analytics, it’s possible to work out customer intent. Want to know how? ResponseTap’s Content Marketing Manager, Matt McGillicuddy, sat down with Chris Rogers, Product Owner at ResponseTap, to find out more.

Matt McGillicuddy (MM): What is speech analytics?

Chris Rogers (CR): In a nutshell, speech analytics is a tool designed to analyze a call. Your phone conversations with customers are full of valuable insights, but short of listening to all of those calls, it’s impossible to access all that data and make it usable. With speech analytics, you can collect all that unstructured data and easily identify patterns.

MM: How does it do this?

CR: It automatically detects key phrases and these phrases are grouped into topics. When a pre-determined phrase is found within a phone call, the speech analytics software stores the phrase and its associated topic against the call record in the call log. This makes it easier to report on the call.

For instance, if you’re running a promotion, you can use speech analytics to pick out the key phrases related to the products you’re promoting. You can then tie this back to reporting on how much interest in the promotion led to a phone call.

MM: What else can it do?

CR: You can also use it to identify and tag multiple outcomes of a call, such as quotes given and appointments booked. This helps you better understand which of your marketing activities are successfully driving various events. 

If you’re using the ResponseTap speech analytics feature, you can also push those conversions into your other tools, as you would with any ResponseTap data, so you have joined-up campaigns that are better optimized.

MM: What are the benefits of real-time speech analytics for marketing teams?

CR: Overall, there are a few ways that using speech analytics can help you if you’re a marketer. Its key feature is that it streamlines processes, smoothing out the reporting systems that you use and speeding things up. It can also help you filter the sales calls from other enquiries, making it easier to prioritize potential leads.

It also comes in where you’re trying to assess the success of a campaign or you’re trying to get a better understanding of the products that customers are interested in. The common key phrases and categories all help marketers build the bigger picture and spot patterns – and even organize any outcomes from a call into more sub-categories.

This isn’t a rigid type of software. It’s changing with every call that comes in and key phrase that’s spoken, and if you’re using it to plot the customer journey, you can adapt the phrases and wider topics to suit your goals.

Another plus is that if your call center has speech analytics software in place, it can help improve the quality of the call, along with the customer experience. Agent training and regulatory compliance can be influenced by speech analytics software as you can chart how the call center agent responded to the caller. So, did the agent follow the script correctly or mention a particular upsell, for example?

MM: What else can a speech analytics tool do?

CR: So, as well as helping you to plot out campaigns and capture leads, you can discover trends in customer behavior and what their demographic is. It allows you to work out the essentials, such as what department a customer was trying to reach and whether they’re a new customer or existing customer.

MM: What considerations should marketers make before they sign up for speech analytics?

CR: To know how to use speech analytics effectively, you’ll need to get the full journey. While it’s important to get the sales service and the conversation details, you’ll also need to consider the steps that led to this, such as details about the potential buyer.

By getting this full process through using your speech analytics tool, you can fully analyze the customer journey and use this to assess the marketing activity that’s working, as well as the areas that need work. You should be able to go back and access the call recordings if you need to check something too.

Another question to ask is whether you can track call conversions alongside using the speech analytics tool? Call tracking software helps you track the call using a unique number and the speech analytics picks up the caller’s keywords. This combination tells you why they are calling and the path they used to call.

To find out more about the speech analytics software available from ResponseTap and how this perfectly complements call tracking tools, get in touch.