The Future of Quality Management: Enhancing Call Recording with Speech Analytics

Call quality management in CX has long been a game of random sampling and hoping that the 3-5% of calls captured accurately represent your center's total audience. Historically, however, leaving the overwhelming majority of calls unanalyzed meant their potential insights were simply lost forever. 

But modern technology and artificial intelligence (AI) have changed the game. One area in particular where AI excels is analytics, and the models that have been trained on text and audio samples have opened the doors to new methods for quality management through call recordings and speech analytics. 

Using technology for better quality management 

There are essentially three components to managing the quality of your customers' experiences with your call center: call recording, speech analytics and AI. 

Call recording 

With more digital options (such as VoIP) readily available, call recording is much more straightforward than it has been in years past. No more tape storage or endless hard drives. No tracing individual recordings back to who was involved, when it took place, etc. With modern contact center software, call recording is often automatic and inherently tied to customers' and agents' records, helping to keep everything organized and, more importantly, traceable. 

But what modern technology enables, really, is complete visibility over every call in your contact center — and the ability to act on all the information therein through speech analytics. 

Speech analytics 

Speech recognition has long been a scientific endeavor, but with varying results. (Just ask anyone who's used an automated directory in the past decade, and you'll likely be regaled with stories of how they ultimately resorted to spamming "0" to talk to an operator.) 

But today, that's no longer the case. Speech recognition and transcription have drastically improved in recent years, especially with the help of AI. Some models even have a 96% accuracy rate. But even they are old hat these days. 

Speech analytics is the process of taking your calls and understanding what's hidden within them by using the audio — not just the words, but the actual waveforms to capture tone and inflection. In some cases, analysis even includes other supplemental information, like the screens the agent was viewing at the time. 

With speech analytics, you can, of course, answer the basic questions like "What are your customers calling in about?" and "Was their issue resolved?" But it also lets you understand how your customers are feeling, whether or not they were frustrated, how empathetic your agents are, and so much more — even as the call is happening. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) 

With all that data at your fingertips, you can unleash what AI is best at: analyzing. AI is superb at taking large amounts of data, picking out trends and identifying commonalities to give you the insights necessary to take action on all your call data. And it does it at scale. 

Let's say you have a 2-minute average handle time (AHT). Considering the average person speaks 125-150 words a minute and after accounting that customer interactions have more pauses than normal speech, if you even have just 100 calls a day, you now have 20,000 words to analyze every single day if you want complete coverage. 

AI can take all those 20,000 words (and the supplemental data) and analyze it all far faster than a human ever could. And, with generative AI capabilities, you can have the analysis, summarization and next steps in no time at all, helping you make the most of your call recordings and drastically improve your contact center's quality management efforts. 

Putting AI-enhanced quality management in practice 

To help you get started, here are two examples where AI can change how you approach quality management. 

Example #1: Sentiment analysis 

Knowing how customers feel and what they think is incredibly powerful information. But it's not just about what they say, but also how they say it. AI-powered speech analytics models are quickly becoming capable of understanding the actual audio waveforms in a call, identifying emotions and keywords, and then compiling all that data to inform you of your customers' sentiment towards your products or services, agents, call center and even your overall organization. And AI can do this all in near-real-time. 

You can then use this data to improve different aspects of your contact center's operations, from more intelligent call routing to better suggested responses for agents in-call. This leads to better calls, happier customers and a transformation from simple quality management to quality optimization. 

Example #2: Agent coaching 

Imagine knowing about a compliance risk before it escalates. Or, recognizing when an agent's empathy battery is a little low and should take a quick break before their next call because of a particularly difficult one. Or, using each agent's metrics to provide assistance throughout the day as well as build personalized training paths to keep that momentum. 

With every call captured and analyzed, the wealth of information at managers' fingertips helps accurately gauge agent performance and offer better and more frequent coaching opportunities. And, with AI, these opportunities happen in the moment, not at their scheduled performance reviews a month down the road. This leads to better quality management across the entire contact center, for every agent and interaction. 

Embrace the data-driven future of quality management 

Of course, for many contact centers, calls are just one channel for customer communication. Emails and live chats are both part of today's omnichannel customer service experience, and your quality management processes must include them. Luckily for CX leaders, technology is here to help there, as well. 

Modern contact center software is not only multi-channel but also multi-lingual, able to analyze every interaction and provide valuable, actionable insights for improving them. Automatically score calls for quality, identify trends and root causes, visualize sentiment and emotion, and much more, for 100% of interactions. 

See what's possible when you adopt what's powering the future of CX. Learn more about the agentic future today.