In contact centers, where communications serve as the sole business driver, it is critical to deliver quality and cost-effective service to differentiate your company. Recording and quality monitoring help by filling the knowledge gap of what is really going on. Monitoring business processes and the changing kaleidoscope of agent communications can transform customer interactions from a phantom to a valuable data resource. However, running a sophisticated solution is time-consuming and costly especially in large contact centers, and many invest in other areas of their business instead.
Still, organizations must analyze customer interactions to meet legal obligations, provide superior customer service and execute data-mining or customer relationship management. The communications recording industry must handle an increasing deluge of information and sift through it to unveil value. Much of this process is addressed by the structured information market, a field some expect to grow at an annual rate of up to 70 percent in coming years.
Speech analytics examines recorded audio by content. It reduces the workload of contact center executives by enabling fast identification of important calls through automated recognition. The solutions available today are based on two major capabilities:
Transcription – conversion of speech into written text using speaker-independent Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognizers (LVCSR), and Phoneme-based recognition -- conversion of speech into phonemes and the identification of strings of phonemes.
Keyword spotting using phoneme recognition and data-mining using transcription make speech analytics especially powerful for any organization with a large volume of incoming calls. It locates predefined words or phrases to find calls related to business processes, e.g. termination of an account. It provides real-time alerts on live audio for immediate reaction or may be configured as a post-processing step to improve agent performance.
Transcription allows numerous applications. Besides the ability to google any word or phrase within a recorded call, it may be used with text-mining to enhance discovery of useful information relating to strategy, product, process and operational issues by using artificial intelligence algorithms in an automated manner.
Many decision-makers are unaware of speech analytics technology and its ability to make their business more competitive, but this will soon change because it saves staff time in an era of rising wages. Furthermore, it extracts critical information otherwise lost in large contact centers. It enables precise and standardized examination of business processes and provides the basis for decisions by supervisors and executives. If its findings are properly heeded, it can mean the difference between company success or failure.
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