For just about every industry, voice data is becoming an increasingly valuable asset. Voice data has become a resource for companies to discover game-changing insights and use them for growth and expansion. It is no surprise that the voice analytics market is set to hit the worth of $1.64 billion by 2025.

For sectors ranging from healthcare to call centers, voice data is indicating how customers are interacted with, understood, and served. As customer experience is becoming a key brand differentiator, companies are leveraging all the data they have in an attempt to gain a competitive edge in the market.

Voice analytics is now used to analyze recorded or live conversations using voice recognition tools and software. Then, these analytics can predict customer sentiment and behavior over phone calls, detect the quality of conversations, and gather deeper insights into customer needs and problems.

While the technology is constantly evolving, there are several ways you can leverage it to gain a deeper, closer-to-reality version of what your customers value, and how they make purchases. Combining analytics from both speech and text can be game-changing for your business.

How to Get the Most Out of Voice Analytics?

To maximize ROI from voice analytics, here are some best practices that companies can follow:

1. Identify gaps and goals – It’s best to start small. Measure how well your enterprise is performing with respect to some specific key performance indicators. After you have done that, define a clear outcome you want to gain from voice analytics. What is it that you want to happen as a result of voice insights? You can start by analyzing customer interactions and identifying the kind of questions and queries your agents struggle with. You could also dig deeper to find out what frustrates your buyers and makes them go bonkers with your reps. This is the opportunity window for you to leverage voice analytics.
2. Determine KPIs – Each business has its set of unique KPIs that matter to their long-term growth. Speech analytics can help you track a host of KPIs such as customer satisfaction, the level of their anxiety, happiness, or confusion – by measuring their voice quality and fluctuations. You get to decide the KPIs that are important for your business. Decide on a handful of KPIs and then benchmark your current performance levels. Knowing where you stand at the beginning of the journey will help you understand the progress you’ve made. Track growth and performance on an ongoing basis to see how you are progressing.
3. Onboard experts – No new software solution can be successfully implemented without the right team. A voice analytics software can be challenging to set up, implement, configure, and customize to your unique needs. You need to understand what data to gather, how to analyze it, and how to make the insights available for your team. Onboard voice analytics specialists who can lay the groundwork for your employees. This will ensure the time-to-value is shorter and you can see results from your investment sooner. Getting help from the right data and analytics experts who understand technology implementation can be your key decision, which will ultimately determine your success with voice analytics.
4. Create a process – Established, tried, and tested processes work like the oil in a voice analytics machine. Without a specific process, things can go haywire pretty soon. Review your data usage, data gathering, and insight extraction procedures before putting them into implementation. Determine how you plan on leveraging the insights you get from voice analytics, who can have access to what data, and how you can control authorization and security protocols. Creating a process that helps you gain maximum leverage out of analytics data is critical. Install 360-degree accountability by distributing responsibilities within the relevant team.
5. Train the team – Help your employees learn about the new system before you roll it out in its entirety. Define what segments are critical to which department and create a structured training program to help them understand how voice analytics can help solve their pressing challenges. Enroll them into a post-launch training that helps them transition into the new and improved way of using data for their advantage. Make sure the new training program is also a part of the hiring process so that fresh employees can work and be productive from day one. Data democratization can be your priority to help non-tech staff leverage voice analytics and derive as much value from it as your specialists.
6. Monitor the results – Discover the value voice analytics is bringing to your bottom line, customer engagement, satisfaction, and other KPIs. Reveal these findings to your core customer support teams to encourage their participation. Ask customer reps for their feedback on how voice analytics can work better for your enterprise and be ready to make changes to your strategy or implementation.
7. Expand – Speech analytics can capture large volume and variety of data that might not be limited to one aspect of your business. After you have seen results with a small approach, expand voice analytics implementation to other focus areas within your enterprise. Enhancements in the bottom line, revenue, and customer experience can be compelling enough for you to want to expand base in other areas.

Creating a positive customer experience can be the driver of profit for businesses in this digital era. Positive customer experiences go a long way in facilitating brand image and helping onboard more customers and retain existing ones.

How Voice Analytics is Shaping Customer Experience

Customer services and support continue to be integral to the overall customer experience. Voice analytics is extensively being used in developing customer services and advancing support. Combining voice analytics with big data techniques are allowing companies to analyze numerous calls at once.

By doing so, they get a fair picture of the working of their customer service operations. By using the insights from voice analytics, companies can implement initiatives to reduce repeat calls and call duration.

Analyzing recorded or live calls can help service reps understand customer pain points and frustrations and avoid outbursts by addressing them in advance. Voice identification and analytics can be the pathway to improving customer experience.

Gain a comprehensive view of the customer across text and speech. Empower contact center teams with the right data to reduce agent call handle time and repeat calls. Discover the root causes of customer churn and predict at-risk customers to take preventive measures proactively and increase brand loyalty.