The Versatility of Speech Analytics

Speech analytics has become the next step for contact centers looking to supplement their quality monitoring solutions with more powerful technology. Contact centers in today's economy provide an essential differentiation point for competitive industries as customers decide between companies with similar products based on the level of customer service and the ability to resolve seemingly intractable problems in one interaction. Speech analytics helps meet customer expectations as by increasing awareness of agent interactions and resolving potential problem areas before they spread and create lasting damage. The power of speech analytics can be evaluated in two major areas: the breadth of its impact on contact center operations and the nature of its implementation.

The Scope of Speech Analytics

Speech analytics increases control and knowledge of contact center operations for larger organizations by assisting the analyzation an otherwise unmanageable number of conversations. It can address critical issues such as achievement of campaign goals, script adherence and agent skills. Management can set an indicator for key performance for agents and use speech analytics to evaluate their fulfilment.

In addition with measurement of agent output improvement, speech analytics can also evaluate customer input such as opinions of the company’s products, frequently asked questions and other reoccurring issues. Speech analytics can also help to evaluate the overall success of a campaign and help management make adjustments in a timely manner. The powerful nature of speech analytics derives from its ability to automate categorization of calls, but its overall capability varies depending on the form of speech analytics used.

Types of Speech Analytics

The system of speech analytics can be divided into the three technologies used to categorize calls. The most fundamental, keyword spotting, is dependent on the words or phrases selected by contact center managers as essential to evaluating customer interactions. These words can be used to find relevant calls for best practices training or to evaluate almost any issue spotted by certain specific phrases. Set up and configuration of keyword spotting is generally affordable for medium-sized contact centers and will quickly generate a positive return on investment. Phonetic indexing provides a more powerful form of speech analytics, but it requires more detailed processing to create a database of phonemes. It uses much more disk space, but it allows faster and more extensive searches once the translations have been compiled. Finally, speech-to-text transcription symbolizes the most sophisticated type of speech analytics. The system must be trained to recognize specific words, and it requires a high level of accuracy. This makes for an expensive set-up period, but once the technology has been implemented, it allows ongoing text mining as your needs evolve.

One day, speech analytics will include even more powerful features such as age or gender spotting. But for many organizations, it is essential today to streamline customer service and provide a competitive edge.

What are BPO Services?

Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is the process of hiring another company to handle business activities for you. It is a subset of outsourcing that involves the operations and responsibilities of specific businesses processes to another service provider. BPO that is contracted based in another country is called Offshore Outsourcing, and BPO on nearby country is called Nearshore Outsourcing. BPO is also categorized as IT-enabled services. Some sub-segments of business process outsourcing industry are KPO (Knowledge Process Outsourcing) and LPO (Legal Process Outsourcing).

BPO is a type of outsourcing that focuses on hiring a third-party service provider to do IT-related operations, typically categorized into back office outsourcing – such as application management and development, data center operations, and also includes internal business functions like human resources, accounting and finance, and customer related services.

In the beginning, Business Process Outsourcing generally consisted of outsourcing processes like payroll, and then it grew to include employee management. Now it covers more functions that are considered ‘non-core businesses’ to the primary business strategy. Now it is common for organizations to outsource financial and administration processes, human resources, call center and customer service activities, accounting and payroll.

BPO is also frequently referred to as ITES (Information Technology-Enabled Services). Since mostly it includes business processes on some form of automation, which performed services are enabled by IT. The derivative of BPO is KPO (Knowledge Process Outsourcing), which is considered by some to be a subset of BPO, KPO includes those activities that require greater skill, knowledge, education and expertise to handle. For example, whereas an insurance company might outsource data entry of its claims forms as part of a BPO initiative, it may also choose to use a KPO service provider to evaluate new insurance applications based on a set of criteria or business rules; this work would require the efforts of a more knowledgeable set of workers than the data entry would. The current definition of KPO encompasses R&D, product development and legal e-discovery, as well as a number of other business functions.

Also coming into use is the term BTO (Business Transformation Outsourcing). This refers to the idea of having service providers contribute to the effort of transforming a business into a leaner, more dynamic, agile and flexible operation.