Listen to Your Heart (or your calls)

By Diana Aviles

I’ve chatted with speech analysts from all walks of life. They speak many languages and are versed in different speech analytics solutions. Despite the fact there are some differences in approaches, we can all agree on the one thing, we consistently struggle to get our organizations to understand: you still need to listen to the calls.

I can bucket, categorize and query the life breath out of everything you need, but at the end of the day it does not absolve you from some type of manual listening. I am notorious for saying that our goal in speech analytics is to help make insights easier to obtain- not outright replace human listening.

What good is a category or query to an organization, if you have no context outside of those key terms and phrases it was programmed with? How do you know if a process is successful, or if it is failing, if you aren’t engaged with the actual agent and customer interaction? What actionable intelligence are you getting from static data? Very little to none. But, you can change that.

Speech Analytics (SA) is an extremely interactive process. It is very exciting to get your hands dirty and discover all sorts of wild stuff you never would’ve found without SA. Sometimes it may feel like it takes forever, but simply adjusting your perspective to see it as being for the greater good of your organization will brighten your outlook and reveal vast benefits. Listening to 100-200 calls certainly will not injure you. There are different strategies on how to create listening studies that are effective and efficient at any size.

The aspect of SA that makes us awesome, is that we can pull insights from data and have the flexibility to further think outside the box, while exploring those insights on a deeper level than our more structured data contemporaries. Speech Analytics is about tying together trends to tell a story, that can help an organization make business decisions. You are doing yourself a big disservice, if you are just sitting around building out queries, and running reports without trying to take a peek at the bigger picture.

So please, do yourself a favor and listen to your calls. I promise you it's worth every second of time you invest in it. 

Diana Aviles is a long time speech analytics fan with a specialty in Nexidia Interaction Analytics. 

She is a vocal speech analytics advocate with the primary objective to simultaneously promote and educate the world of Speech Analytics with a human touch; one which further emphasizes the importance of First Call Resolution and overall customer experience.

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