How to make speech analytics your competitive advantage

Not so long ago, marketers had to rely on a lot of guesswork and ‘finger-in-the-air’ tactics when making strategic decisions.

In fact, many still do.

But with the arrival of marketing analytics technologies – such as speech analytics for phone calls – every single decision a marketer makes can now be backed up by rock-solid data.

Thankfully, we live in reassuring times. Awkward questions about proving ROI and justifying budgeting decisions can now be tackled head-on with data-backed reports and analytical insight.

And when it comes to gathering gritty, real-world customer data, there’s nothing more powerful than speech analytics.

What is speech analytics?

Speech analytics is a tool that records conversations and interactions between customers and companies. It incorporates speech recognition technology to identify useful spoken words of the customer, as well as the purpose of the call.

This gives marketers the power to identify leads that are likely to convert. Plus, it allows them to spot trends and optimise campaigns accordingly while identifying any keywords they’re not yet making use of.

The transcriptions feature saves you time by allowing you to scan conversations instead of listening to them. You can also search the transcription content and skip to any point in the conversation.

These features allow marketers to use the data from speech analytics to improve the customer experience, and make confident decisions about budgeting, campaign strategy, and more.

Let’s take a deeper look at speech analytics and see how it can help your business grow.

The big business benefits of speech analytics

Customer insight

First and foremost, speech analytics is a fantastic tool to help you understand what your prospects are looking for and any concerns they may have about buying your product or service.

It means that, with an in-depth understanding of the needs and interests of your customers, you can make improvements to your products and services and the way you market them.

Speech analytics functions as a great overall sentiment analysis tool, too. It can help you understand the bigger picture of how many customers and prospects are satisfied or dissatisfied with your products and services. In turn, this allows your business to take actions that drive improved levels of customer satisfaction.

Similarly, speech analytics tools can help marketers map buying journeys and discover the factors that influence customer purchasing decisions. This means firms can predict future needs, which can further boost sales and streamline operations.

For example, automotive businesses can better understand the common reasons why customers call the dealership – whether it’s to make an enquiry about a new car, book a service or something else. The data that’s gathered can then be centralised and used to help the entire dealer group streamline and improve customer experience and sales performance.

Customer experience

Customer experience is everything in today’s always-on, digital-first world.

Speech analytics, when used in conjunction with call recording tools, enables businesses to assess the success and performance rates of calls to ensure that the best customer experience is being delivered at all times.

Monitoring your team with call recording tools alongside insight gathered on customers through speech analytics, can help your business in multiple ways, including:

• Helping you understand what process and customer experiences are preferred by your prospects
• Trialling new tactics and approaches for meeting customer needs
• Incentivising your team to deliver the best customer experience
• Training your team and driving a culture of constant improvement and learning

For a care home, speech analytics can be an invaluable tool in helping you understand where customer concerns arise and what they might be.

For example, you may see a common trend of enquiries that ask about resident mental health. You may find that your team struggles to give satisfactory responses to these questions. If the enquiries are frequent enough, it may trigger you to create some useful resources around the issue which you can place on your website. That way, your prospects can find the answers they need much earlier in their buying journey, and your team no longer needs to spend time discussing the issue during phone calls.

With speech analytics and performance monitoring, team leaders also have the data they need to make improvements to call handling times while helping their team to exceed customer expectations.

Identifying new business opportunities

By using speech analytics, marketers can identify the behavioural patterns that drive higher sales volumes and use this information to present customers with the right product at the right time.

Speech analytics can help businesses perfect their marketing messages, increase customer loyalty, and boost conversion rates.

For marketing agencies, this can have a huge impact on their work for clients. Not only can it help improve campaign performance, but it also helps build greater trust with clients and drive retention. When reliable data from speech analytics can be used to prove campaign ROI, the client-agency bond can be strengthened.

Speech analytics also helps marketers spot competitive challenges or opportunities. For example, marketers might notice that there are particular words or phrases that indicate a poor customer experience and that customers are beginning to jump ship to a competitor.

Equally, you may see that many customers ask about a particular element of your product or service, indicating the customer may be a good candidate for a higher value product.

Having this insight helps marketers know when they need to consider making improvements to the customer experience. It also helps to spot opportunities to convert one-off customers to repeat business, or to drive up-sell and cross-sell conversions.

Ultimately, speech analytics helps drive the biggest business opportunity of all: a competitive advantage. First-party data, such as that you can gather from your phone calls, can keep you several steps ahead of your competitors when understanding customer needs, wants, and desires.

Cutting wasted spend

For many marketers, speech analytics is an investment that saves them a significant amount of money in the long run.

At Mediahawk, our clients often tell us that speech analytics has helped them save money in the following ways:

• Knowing the common reasons why customers call, allowing call centre teams to proactively troubleshoot customer concerns and questions in advance – saving precious time and resources
• Improving decision-making, to turn guesswork into data-backed strategies and reduce wasted spending for marketing campaigns
• Better targeting campaigns for customer need, delivering prospects the right message at the right time
• Reducing pressure for their teams by streamlining workflows, cutting manual tasks and providing time-saving ways to complete campaign analysis

When implemented in any business, speech analytics can help drive business growth to new heights, while allowing you to scale your marketing analytics without bringing in additional team support.

Turn conversations into insights

At the end of the day, speech analytics allows you to take raw phone call data and draw out critical insights that help you save time, money and a huge amount of effort.

It helps you improve productivity, boost customer experience and drive up efficiency – all while improving ROI and cutting wasted budget.

For today’s marketers, it really is a win-win, and a must-have tool for any business looking to stay ahead of the competition with unparalleled customer insight.