What is Text and Speech Analytics?

Text and speech analytics are technical tools that leverage artificial intelligence, such as natural language processing, to understand human speech and use that ability to identify patterns, like high occurrences of keywords and phrases. Text and speech analytics, sometimes referred to as interaction analytics, can rapidly analyze huge amounts of data to provide users with real-time or near real-time insights.

Text and speech analytics are commonly used in contact centers to analyze customer service interactions. Voice recordings are first transformed to written transcripts before analysis. Once that’s done, text and speech analytics can comb through 100% of contacts from every channel, including phone, chat, email, text (SMS), and social media. The valuable information analytics software can provide includes:

• Contact drivers

• Emerging problems

• Trending topics

• Potential compliance issues

• Root causes

• Organization and agent-level quality

These insights allow contact centers to provide more proactive customer experiences, know their customers better, quickly address new problems, and have a more comprehensive view of interaction quality. The information produced by text and speech analytics can also be used to identify targeted training opportunities. And when that information is combined with other customer feedback, such as survey scores, organizations can have a more holistic Voice of the Customer (VOC).

Text and speech analytics tools can also determine customer sentiment based on keywords and conversational characteristics such as voice volume and pitch. Knowing customer sentiment allows contact centers to take closed-loop actions with dissatisfied customers to try to rescue the relationships. Additionally, agents can be measured and rewarded on their customer sentiment scores.

The best text and speech analytics tools are cloud-based, for maximum flexibility, and don’t require a data science degree to use or understand output.