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GenAI is Transforming Conversation Analytics and Making it Better

November 2024

As consumers, we’re bombarded with marketing declaring that products are “new and improved,” which is frequently reinforced with updated packaging and a different name. However, we often discover the product hasn’t really changed much – if at all. Is that the case with conversation analytics? Are these solutions the speech and text analytics applications we’ve known for decades, just with a different name? The answer is a resounding “no”! 

Historical speech analytics, which has been commercially available for over 20 years, was a game-changer in its day, providing rudimentary insights into the reasons customers called an organization based on keywords, and later, key phrases. As natural language processing (NLP) capabilities advanced, so did speech – and text – analytics, delivering an expanded volume of data regarding customers, their sentiment and emotions, and more. 

But the addition of GenAI technology means these solutions are “new and improved.” The leading conversation analytics solutions now deliver a level of essential and increasingly meaningful data and insights the original applications were never intended to provide to users. These greatly enhanced solutions analyze both sides of entire conversations in any voice and digital channel, necessitating a name that better aligns with their advanced analytical capabilities. Today’s GenAI-enabled conversation analytics applications more accurately identify customer intents, detect a wide range of emotions, substantially enhance sentiment analysis, and correlate customer and employee behaviors with business outcomes. 

But many more benefits are being delivered by the new generation of conversation analytics solutions. Their underlying analytical capabilities also enable several related applications that elevate both the customer and employee experience (CX/EX) in multiple ways, including:

  • Real-time guidance (RTG) – while the primary objective of RTG is giving agents the contextual knowledge, procedures, and guidance to better assist customers during the first contact, these applications also reduce agent onboarding, training, and handling times, as well as boost employee engagement. 
  • Automated quality management (AQM) – conversation analytics enables organizations to automatically review up to 100% of their voice and digital customer interactions, up significantly from the 1% – 3% typically evaluated in a contact center’s manual QM program, and at a considerable cost savings. AQM solutions can assess agent soft skills and knowledge gaps and recommend coaching and/or training sessions, frequently scheduling and delivering the content directly to the agent.
  • Automated post-interaction summarization – GenAI-based conversation analytics power the ability to extract customer intents, key entities, and interaction events from live conversations, creating a concise summary of the interaction in seconds (while often dispositioning the account as well). This eliminates the need for agents to manually perform these tasks and improves the summaries’ quality. Innovative applications can identify follow-up items from the conversation to help ensure customer commitments are met, or they can kick-off automated workflows to complete the promised tasks.

The three applications described above each leverage GenAI-enhanced transcription as an underlying contributor to their processes. When GenAI is supported by an appropriately trained, curated, and maintained large language model (LLM), transcription accuracy undergoes ongoing improvement. 

Conversation analytics solutions and their related applications will get better, as continuous improvement is a standard component of both. These solutions already add value and provide great benefits to customers, agents, and a company’s bottom line, and more enhancements are on their way.

DMG specializes in helping contact centers and customer service organizations select the right solutions and partners to succeed in today’s AI-enabled world. Learn more in our Conversation Analytics for the Digital Era report, or reach out to Deborah Navarra at deborah.navarra@dmgconsult.com if you’d like help in selecting and implementing one of these essential applications.