Avoiding the Pitfalls of Speech Analytics

Speech analytics is a fantastic tool when it’s used properly. It has the ability to provide valuable insights into customer needs, wants and opportunities. Business insights can be identified and correlated within short time frames, even in real time, without intruding on customers. Even better, it all happens “magically” behind the scenes, without slowing down customer interactions (service, sales, collections, field service), and without focus groups.

This sounds great and it can be, when the potential barriers and challenges are addressed. Speech analytics is not a “field of dreams” where you build it and the insights just appear and are acted upon. It requires a significant investment of time and resources to identify actionable insights that can improve the performance of the contact center and, possibly, the entire enterprise. Figure 1 presents the top 4 reasons why speech analytics implementations often fail to yield the expected (and frequently promised) results and payback.