Finding the right Speech Analytics Solution starts with knowing the right questions to ask. It’s also important to know that avoiding Speech Analytics mistakes requires you to know the questions not worth asking.
Thanks to Roger Lee of Gridspace for sharing his insight at Customer Contact Week. Roger is a long-time contact center industry veteran and a respected thought-leader. At the event he conducted a workshop about Speech Analytics and he graciously shared with me his observations about what occurred during that workshop.
Here is an edited transcript of my interview with Roger:
Jim Rembach: This is Jim with the Fast Leader Show and Call Center Coach and I’m here at CCW (Customer Contact Week) with my good friend Roger Lee of Gridspace. Now, Roger you had the opportunity to sit on some interactive educational sessions and you were facilitating actionable analytics sessions. However, a lot of the questions that you were fielding and we’re helping people with were in regards to speech analytics, so what were some of the things that people are asking about.
Speech Analytics Mistake #1: Being driven by misconceptions
Roger Lee: Yeah thanks Jim great question. So, about ninety percent (90%) of the audience that attended the sessions were new on looking for a speech analytics platform. And so, some of those questions they were asking were interesting because I think there is a large amount of maybe misconception around what speech analytics is exes and really what it can do for the organization.
Mistake #2: Not knowing what your solving for
One of the questions what I had asked was so what is the business problem you’re trying to solve a speech analytics? About fifty percent (50%) of the attendees really did not know how to answer that question.
Mistake #3: You should know WHY people are calling
They would say I want to use speech analytics to help me understand why people are calling. Well, you’re call center or contact center you should know why people are calling right. So, it was more of validating why people are calling then that’s a good use of speech analytics.
Mistake #4: Improperly selling it to the C-suite
Another question was, how do I sell it to the C-suite. Awe that’s a really long discussion, but I will tell you there are definitely elements of a business case that we have shown can help as you are designing and developing why speech analytics is so important to your organization. And it can be very simple, but I look at two particular areas of a business case, improving agent performance and also how to improve the enterprise as a whole. So, there’s two pieces. Some of the initial conversations in the workshop was about agent performance, how to streamline the QA (Quality Assurance) process. All very important, but that necessarily won’t sell it to the C-suite.
Mistake #5: Not testing transcription accuracy
So, if you’re looking for speech analytics platform to help you address your business problems within your contact center, here’s some things that you should be aware of.
One, take a look at transcription accuracy. How accurate is the information that you’re gleaning from those call recordings or live conversations?
Mistake #6: Not testing for user friendliness
Two, how easy is it to use the application from an end-user perspective? Do you need a number of resources in addition to your already tasked team of QAs or analysts to review calls and to use the application?
Mistake #7: Not knowing the back of the product
Third, when you’re looking at the technology take a look at how is the back of the of the solution being used. In other words, is the speech analytics solution phonetic-based or semantic-based? There are definitely clear differences on how the tool recognizes and transcribes and uses the information from the call recordings.
Jim Rembach: I think one of the things that’s also important, you and I had talked about before, is really understanding the difference between intent and emotion. Tell us a little bit about that.
Roger Lee: Yeah that’s a great that’s a great call out. There’s a number of conversations or questions regarding sentiment right. So, they want to understand the caller’s intent or sentiment of the call. Or even how the agent responds.
I use the term more of what I call emotion modeling. That is a big difference. Sentiment is really looking at the words, emotion modeling is looking at the tonality of the conversation in addition to the context of the conversation. Those two attributes will make up the emotion modeling will actually give you a fairer or clear representation of what is happening.
Jim Rembach: Well I think the biggest difference is not what the intention is or desire is, heck even as far as the resolution, but it’s what happens from an emotional perspective. Because that’s going to affect how they feel about the organization when the call is concluded.
Roger Lee: Exactly. Even during the call there’s an opportunity. If the emotion is not where it needs to be there’s an opportunity for the agent along with a supervisor to try to save or change that emotion. So, at the beginning to call it could be negative but by the middle of the call you could you be neutral and hopefully by the end it could be very positive. There’s a great opportunity there to leverage the emotion peace accordingly.
Jim Rembach: Roger thanks for sharing your knowledge and wisdom and helping us all make better decisions when it comes to avoid Speech Analytics mistakes.
Roger Lee: Thank you very much for your time.
