Speech Analytics: How it works

Speech analytics turns customer calls into a goldmine of data. While agents focus on closing tickets, organizations use speech analytics to decode customer sentiment and identify areas for improvement.

Since it's impossible to manually review thousands of calls daily, speech analytics software has become essential for modern contact centers.

By turning conversations into data, speech analytics has the potential to transform how your business understands and serves customers.

While many contact centers already have speech analytics software, the challenge isn't collecting data – it's turning that data into actionable insights.

In this article, we'll explore how speech analytics works, how the data is currently being used, and how some of the top industries are amplifying their speech analytics data to get the most value from their investment.

• What is speech analytics
• How speech analytics works
• Benefits of speech analytics‍
• How to amplify your speech analytics data
• How top industries use speech analytics
• Future trends in speech analytics

What is Speech Analytics?

Speech analytics is the data created from analyzed live or recorded conversations between agents and customers, using advanced algorithms.

Two Types of Speech Analytics in a Call Center

There are two main types of speech analytics in a call center, each presents an opportunity to gather data:

1. Real-time speech analytics

Real-time speech analytics uses audio data during live customer calls.

2. Post-call speech analytics

Post-call speech analytics examines all interactions once completed and offers insights to inform future customer support strategies and processes.

How Does Speech Analytics Work?

Speech analytics software uses machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and generative AI (Gen AI) to examine speech patterns, keywords, and emotions.

The science behind how speech analytics works is divided into three key phases.

1. Call listening and recording

Speech analytics software records calls between agents and customers that come into the contact center. Post consolidation, speech analytics uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) to assess tonality and sentiment. It also uses advanced speech-to-text engines for accurate transcription.

2. Speech analysis

Now that all the call recordings are well-structured, they are ready for analysis. Speech analytics groups conversations based on context, sentiment, and content highlighting noteworthy key phrases and can even redact personal information for security and compliance. 

In-depth speech analysis helps organizations: 

• Understand how customers feel
• Identify trends and patterns of how call center agents solve customer issues
• Rectify recurring service issues and reasons for contacting
• Ensure quality standards are met

Most speech analytics software stops here, and the manual aspect of sifting the data for the gold begins (unless using speech analytics as part of a broader CCaaS eco-system).

3. Actionable insights 

The final phase of speech analytics is transforming data into action. This is where executives, quality trainers, and team leaders take insights from call analysis and turn them into:

• Strategic improvements in agent coaching and development
• Customer experience enhancements based on feedback patterns
• Quality assurance refinements and process improvements
• Product and service adjustments based on customer pain points
• Updates to training materials and call scripts

While some speech analytics software provides insights like sentiment analysis, the challenge lies in actioning this data effectively. Without a systematic approach to turning insights into action, valuable data remains unused, sitting in dashboards instead of driving improvements.

The gap between data collection and data utilization is clear: Having speech analytics capabilities is one thing – but turning that data into measurable improvements in agent performance and customer satisfaction requires an integrated approach that connects insights to specific actions across your contact center operations.

Benefits of Speech Analytics

With the right approach to turning speech analytics into action, contact centers will see significant improvements across multiple areas of their operations.

Here's how speech analytics drives measurable results:

Enhance customer experience

According to McKinsey,

Brands that use speech analytics improve customer satisfaction scores by 10%.

Increase agent performance

Speech analytics assists in improving overall call center productivity by providing team leaders with the call data to give agents personalized coaching and targeted feedback.

Improve operational efficiency

Speech analytics helps identify the most common customer queries and issues. Call centers can use these for customer insights, or to update standard operating procedures (SOPs).

Build a competitive edge

Speech analytics software will surface specific themes, enabling your brand to refine offerings and adapt quickly to market changes.

Retain loyal customers

Speech analytics pinpoints common issues that slow down resolution times or lead to customer frustration.

Best Practices for Using Speech Analytics Data

While collecting speech analytics data is valuable, maximizing its impact is where the gold lies.

Here are 3 proven best practices to turn speech analytics insights into measurable improvements:

1. Set clear objectives and KPIs

‍Begin by establishing your baseline performance metrics. Monitor agent performance today and set a realistic timeline once the baseline results come in. Some standard KPIs to track include average handle time (AHT) and CSAT.

2. Implement consistent coaching

Speech analytics data provides a foundation for personalized agent development. Transform this data into targeted coaching opportunities based on individual performance gaps and KPIs. AI-driven platforms like AmplifAI can identify the most impactful coaching opportunities for each agent, ensuring development efforts focus on areas with the highest potential impact.

3. Drive actionable improvements

The true essence of speech analytics lies in launching initiatives based on the insights gained. Utilize these insights to understand what customers want in your product and service, improve agent performance, or revise call scripts. Each insight should connect to specific improvements in your contact center operations.

How to Amplify Your Speech Analytics Data

Speech analytics data is only valuable if it's being used. Many contact centers have the data but struggle to turn it into meaningful action. The key is integrating speech analytics data into a unified system that drives real improvements across your contact center.

Unify your data: Input your data into advanced AI (from over 150 sources), including speech analytics, for a complete view of contact center performance. This integration creates data-driven personas of your top performers, revealing exactly what drives their success.

Performance intelligence: AI transforms unified data into actionable insights through role-based dashboards. Every level of the contact center gains clear visibility into performance, while real-time alerts highlight opportunities before they impact customer experience.

AI-driven coaching: AI analyzes performance data to recommend next best actions for each agent, cutting coaching prep time from 20 minutes to 1 minute. This gives team leaders more time for meaningful agent development.

Quality Assurance: Let tools like Auto QA handle routine evaluations automatically. Integration with speech analytics software makes it easy to address quality concerns without sifting through mountains of data.

Gamification and recognition: Personalize recognition using speech analytics data. Keep agents motivated through data-driven gamification, social recognition, and team competitions that make improving metrics engaging and rewarding.

Connecting speech analytics insights to every aspect of contact center operations, creates a system that continuously improves both agent performance and customer experience.

AmplifAI, recently recognized as a Gartner Cool Vendor, is the only performance enablement platform that amplifies the value of your speech analytics data through AI-driven insights and actions.

How Top Industries Use Speech Analytics Data

Leading companies across industries are transforming their contact center operations by maximizing the value of their speech analytics data.

Banking and financial services

Prescott National Bank’s call center data was scattered and manually analyzing it was too time-consuming. AmplifAI’s unified dashboard aggregated speech analytics data from all sources, helping supervisors view agent performance metrics leading to a 16% improvement in the first-call resolution rate.

Retail

Chewy, an online pet product retailer, reduced time spent on manual coaching tasks from 19.24 hours per week to just 7.2 hours per week, giving supervisors the time to work on targeted agent improvement and deliver better customer experiences.

Chewy recently became recognized as the #1 retailer for customer service.

Future Trends in Speech Analytics

The evolution of speech analytics is moving beyond data collection into intelligent action. As AI advances, speech analytics is becoming part of a broader performance management ecosystem rather than remaining a standalone tool.

Contact center leaders, pressed for time and overwhelmed with data, are driving the adoption of AI solutions that remove these burdens.

Going into 2025 and beyond, successful contact centers will leverage speech analytics as part of integrated platforms that offer:

• AI-Powered Insights
• Automated Quality Assurance
• Performance Management Integration
• Personalization at Scale

Don't let valuable speech analytics data sit unused. Transform your contact center by connecting speech analytics to your entire ecosystem of quality assurance, coaching, and recognition tools.

Ready to amplify the value of your speech analytics data?

‍Book a demo with our team today.