WHITE PAPER

20 speech analytics use cases
to help you succeed
For nearly two decades, speech analytics software hastransformed how organizations analyze conversations in thecontact center. Whether you’re a marketing executive, abusiness process guru or a seasoned contact center professional,
it is important to know all the ways to leverage this powerful
analytics tool. This white paper discusses the features of speech
analytics and how they can be used to gain insights that will
improve the customer experience, employee engagement anddrive compliance.

Contents
Improving the customer journey and overall experience3

1. Customer channel containment and call avoidance		3

2. Customer communications insight and call avoidance		4

3. Identify and correct processes or automation outliers		

5

4. What are customers escalating?		

6

5. Competitive intelligence		

6

6. Trigger surveys with a purpose

77. Single source of multichannel insight with text analytics

8

Driving employee engagement and coaching

8

8. Reduce customer effort

8

9. Call dispositioning

9

10. Net Promoter Score (NPS) validation

10

11. Pulling calls for coaching vs. pushing moments that demand attention

11

12. Analytics-driven quality monitoring

11

13. Automating traditional QA scoring13

14. Reducing employee effort

13

15. Agent training

15

16. Average handle time (AHT) reduction

15

17. First contact resolution (FCR) improvements

16

Turning compliance insights into action

16

18. Keeping out of trouble

16

19. Managing compliance16

20. Compliance and the customer experience

17

Assembling a successful speech analytics team17

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Channel owners:• Web content management team• Social media team• Interactive voice response team
• Mobile app team• Community forum manager• Customer portal team

The term speech analytics has often been referred to as word spotting or keyword
search. With increased accuracy and speed, speech analytics has outgrown thesebasic terms and now represents the tools needed to understand not only voiceinteractions converted to text, but interactions that are natively text, such as emails,
click-to-chat, social media and customer relationship management notes. But justhaving the ability to find a word, phrase or sentiment is not enough to justify theinvestment in the tool, organizations should deploy the technology with precisionand intent.
OpenText has seen the number of use cases for speech analytics grow overthe past two decades. This paper summarizes the top 20 that can helporganizations succeed.
This white paper separates the 20 use cases into three categories:
1. Improving the customer journey and overall experience
2. Driving employee engagement and coaching
3.Turning compliance insights into action
Each section is full of customer examples and return on investment (ROI)
calculations. The paper also provides a best practice for assembling a successful
speech analytics team.

Improving the customer journey and overall experience
1. Customer channel containment and call avoidance
For cost-conscious customer service organizations, creating self-service toolson their website, phone menus (IVR), mobile apps and community forums area cost-effective way to deflect customers from the most expensive channel—
the contact center. And while each of these channels is designed with the best
intentions, not every scenario can be accounted for at design time. How doyou satisfy the customer’s need? Which options should be mentioned first?
What tools should be used on the website? Is the mobile app helpful?
Customers frequently mention these alternative channels when speaking to anagent on the contact center:• Your mobile app wouldn’t let me…
• That page on your website didn’t make sense!
• The mobile app couldn’t…
• I was stuck in your phone system and I couldn’t understand• I’m logged into your site, but I can’t find where I…
OpenText recommends implementing phrases for various customer channels tobuild Smart Views in OpenText™ Explore to identify words, phrases and sentimentthat express dissatisfaction for each channel. Users can build unique Smart Views
for each channel and share the view with channel owners.

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3/17Communication owner:• Customer Communications
Management team
• Claims team
• Forms and automation team
• Customer portal team

The most common contact center metric for this use case is call avoidance. The
most common metric used by the channel owner is channel containment. One
represents reducing calls to the contact center and the other represents the
success of containing a customer by that channel. Although usually the objective
is to increase call avoidance and channel containment, some revenue-generating
centers will be trying to do the opposite, for example, monitoring shopping cart
abandonment to see why customers leave their items and call. In some rare cases,a web team may want to increase conversion into the contact center. Organizations
can create a steering committee to evaluate all channels and plan a strategy that isright for them.
2. Customer communications insight and call avoidanceEach day, organizations send out thousands, possibly millions, of emails and piecesof postal mail. While most of these might be advertisements and promotions, there
will also be communications such as:• Statements.
• Explanation of benefits.
• Notices.
• Documents.
• Forms.
• Newsletters.
• Reminders.
In most cases, just like channel containment, an organization’s goal should be to
reduce the amount of calls generated by these communications. Again, customers
frequently mention these communications when speaking to an agent in thecontact center:• The calculation on page two doesn’t look right.
• What do I need to pay the doctor?
• When does this expire? It isn’t clear.
• I have a question about the newsletter.
• Do I need to fill out section three on that form?
OpenText recommends building out phrases that express dissatisfaction withvarious customer channels and building Smart Views in Explore to identify words,
phrases and sentiment for each communication method. Users can build unique
Smart Views for each channel and share the view with communication owners.
As an example, a large insurance company in the United States used speech
analytics to modify the explanation of benefits (EOB) documents sent to customers
after a health insurance claim. Their old EOB, which was simple text and usedindustry jargon and abbreviations, was driving calls into the contact center at a highvolume. The insights from speech analytics identified the most commonly asked
questions and the topics creating the most dissatisfaction. The EOB was redesignedwith color callouts, graphs that clearly explained the calculations and tips to help
the client understand the document without having to call the contact center. Callvolume was significantly reduced and has saved the organization millions of dollars.

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3. Identify and correct processes or automation outliers
Organizations can use speech analytics to find terms associated with specificprocesses. Processes can include things such as:• Fulfillment of an order.
• Refunds or returns.
• Employee automation.
• Missing items.
• Broken systems.
The goal is to fix the broken process by identifying when something didn’t goright. Most of these projects will start with a BPI (business process improvement)journey map. In the article, Using end-to-end processes to improve customer
service is a ‘No Brainer,’ author Holly Lyke-Ho-Gland of the American Productivity
and Quality Center says, “There is enormous value by looking across the businesssilo and focus on the customer and value-creation through end-to-end processes.
This value is even more evident when paired with customer journey maps, which
ultimately improves the customer experience.” 1
But how can organizations find where processes are broken? They can start bybuilding Smart Views that target phrases such as:• I never received the email.
• I opened the box and it was missing.
• Your mobile app gave me an error.
• I don’t understand the process.
• I can’t get into your system.
BPI projects can have tremendous return on investment. In most cases, searchingfor the process outliers is the hardest part of the post-journey mapping process.
Finding enough examples of a “defect” or “failure” is easy with speech analytics.
Organizations should use tools such as clustering, word map clouds and trend
graphs that provide a picture of not just the known problem, but the root cause.
Why did the email not go? What is causing the system to crash? Why are the items
missing from some orders? This can significantly help users such as:• Six sigma researchers.
• Business process improvement teams.
• IT professionals.
• Journey mapping project leaders.

1 Lyke-Ho-Gland, Holly. APQC Blog, Using End-to-End Processes to Improve Customer Service is a ‘No Brainer’(2018), https://www.apqc.org/blog/using-end-end-processes-improve-customer-service-no-brainer

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4. What are customers escalating?

An organization’s executive teamcan open Twitter or Facebook at
any time to discover more about its
brand. These tools are accessible
and executive leadership can evenget daily reports with social media
insights. But they should consider
the quantity of tweets or posts theyreceive compared to the volume
of calls they receive. This is called
the Tweet:Call ratio. In many cases,
this can be 1:1,000 or 1:10,000.
Are executives getting a clear
picture of the customer experience
with one one-thousandths of thestory? OpenText recommends a
two-phased approach to social
media insights:“I WANT TO SPEAK TO YOUR SUPERVISOR!”— the words that no contact center
agent ever wants to hear. Escalations are the symptom of something terribly
gone wrong or customers’ perceived injustice. For this best practice, organizations
should not limit their search to the phrase “want to talk to a supervisor.” They
should start by building a search on the phrase, but then let concept-based
understanding reveal the surrounding words and phrases.

1. Quickly fix: Social media ispublic. Organizations should
invest in tools that quickly identify
customer mentions in social media
and resolve them publicly. But
they should not rely exclusively
on these social media interaction
tools to paint a picture of theircustomer service organization,
sales aptitude or brand image
2. Holistically understand: Speech
analytics can help organizations
understand the bigger picture.
Instead of basing their roll-up
reporting to the C-suite on one
comment, they can amplify theirunderstanding with the 1,000. And
executives will appreciate making
decisions based on data rather
than the rants of the vocal few.

The escalation root cause can be:• Agent related: “Related concepts” word maps will review cases that are due
to agent behaviors, such as a lack of empathy, knowledge or action. These calls
can be automatically classified with an “Escalation” tag and used for coaching.
Further in this document, the section on evaluation plans discusses how to
avoid escalations.
• Business related: With the phrase “no offense to you, but I need speak to asupervisor,” there is a subtle difference in tone and wording. But this escalationis generally because of something beyond the agent’s control. These instances
can be a real process breakdown, but can also be an example of fishing.
Fishing means repeated attempts at a task, such as asking supervisors to securea refund, concession or upgrade. Businesses can learn from these fishingexpeditions to prepare for loopholes and ways to please customers fromthe onset.
Lastly, escalations unchecked can lead to a more serious type of speech analytics
query, which includes mentions such as:• Attorney general.
• Better Business Bureau.
• My lawyer (attorney).
• See you in court!
• Consumer Financial Protection Board (CFPB).
• File a complaint.
Organizations can find escalations, coach employees and fix business-related
challenges before problems go from bad to worse.
5. Competitive intelligence
Speech analytics is an invaluable tool for competitive insights, such as how
customers compare an organization to its competition. Customers share their
feedback openly with agents in the contact center and now is the time to throw
away tick sheets and tally cards. Most contact centers use call dispositioning
and manual methods with moderate success. Plus, these are not easily traceable
to the original interaction. If an organization tallied all competitive mentions
in one day, it would be difficult to find those calls and listen to them in context.
Speech analytics can point users to the root cause and frequency of mentionsof their organization’s products and services. How often is the competitor
mentioned? Which ones are mentioned and about which topics. Is it price?
Functionality? Service?

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Ask. Listen. Connect.
OpenText enables a truly holistic,
360-degree voice of the customer(VoC) approach by collecting andanalyzing customer feedback inthree ways:• Ask: OpenText™ Qfiniti Survey
collects direct inbound andoutbound responses in the form ofcustomer satisfaction surveys.
• Listen: Explore captures indirect
customer feedback throughadvanced speech analytics.
• Connect: OpenText™ Qfiniti ICE
enriches the content of customer
interactions by automaticallyassigning metadata points from
CRM and computer telephony
integration (CTI) to identify
inferred feedback from every
customer interaction.
Broad and deep VoC rewards not
only the customer but the employee
and the business as well by:• Reducing survey fatigue throughsmart campaigns triggered byspeech analytics.
• Providing contextual feedback
from each interaction within thecomplete inferred picture.
• Delivering direct andcomprehensive customer feedback
based on rich VoC insights
into expectations, behaviors
and opinions.

20 speech analytics use cases to help you succeed

An organization can list its competitors as separate Smart Views and track results.
These results can drive:• Pricing decisions.
• Product design.
• Brand awareness.
• Advertising threats.
While social media is a frequently used tool for competitive intel, it only represents a
fraction of the customer’s voice.
6. Trigger surveys with a purpose
When a customer survey form is designed in most enterprise feedback management(EFM) tools, the design of the form is typically based on a broad audience. Full ofquestion branching, jumping and options, these forms are reusable across different
call types, customer types and scenarios. With this approach, customer survey
forms have questions such as:• What was the purpose of your call today?
• Did you experience any problems with your service?
• Please select which of the following reasons for your call.
• Did you call more than once to have your issue resolved?
• Which product are you calling about today?
Unfortunately, customers must answer these questions as part of a survey because
organizations can’t link this data to the survey system. Each answer provides
specific “branches” of the survey form and increases the validity of the data. But
why ask a customer for information that is already known? For three reasons:
1. The EFM system is not linked to customer relationship management (CRM),
contact center interaction metadata or call recordings.
2. Call dispositioning mechanisms are incorrect or not maintained.
3.The EFM vendor is charging by the amount of forms maintained in their systemand having one large form is cheaper than having multiple forms connected
to metadata.

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Does that run small?

With the addition of speech analytics, organizations can:Recently a retailer leveraged
OpenText™ Explore to reduce
customer effort by making
the shopping experience
seamless and easy. In one case,speech analytics identified that“true-to-size” information was
not being communicated about
all clothing items in a variety ofretail channels. Working with theirvarious suppliers, spokespeople,
web designers and sales
channels, they coached on how
to communicate sizing information
to address questions such as:• Route specific surveys based on the topic of conversation AND the metadata.

• Should I go up a size or down asize if I’m unsure?
• Will that shrink?
• If I’m normally a “medium,” should
I buy an 8?
• Does that run a little on thesmall side?
This retailer reduced customer effort
and increased online purchases
without the assistance of a contact
center agent. For every order that
does not require the assistance ofa sales or service professional, theretailer can save $5 to $15.

• Reduce customer effort by only asking relevant questions.
• Increase survey acceptance rates by offering shorter surveys.
• Leverage flexible survey vendors that charge by survey consumption and not by
the quantity of forms.
• Reduce the overall amount of surveys issued by using speech analytics to “Listen”
rather than just “Ask” for feedback.
7. Single source of multichannel insight with text analytics
With the expansion of the customer experience into new channels, speech analytics
tools have grown to incorporate more than just phone conversations. Speech
analytics can often be referred to as interaction analytics, multichannel analytics,
customer analytics or voice of the customer analytics. The inputs can vary fromphone calls, emails, click-to-chat, social media and CRM notes. Speech analytics istranscribing 100 percent of voice conversations and turning them into text, but now
organizations can combine those conversations with data across the enterprise.
This means they can increase the scope of searches to include these interactions
and then toggle on and off the results by channel to pinpoint the root-case of anissue or target a customer sentiment in that channel. The team on these speech
analytics projects can include:• Web chat administrators.
• Social media teams.
• Email teams.
• Customer experience teams.
• Customer journey mapping teams.

Driving employee engagement and coaching
8. Reduce customer effort
In a recent CustomerThink article, Jim Rembach said, “From a customer effort
standpoint, you’re blind. Your biggest source of insight data is not visible. It’s
estimated that as much as 80 percent of the world’s data is locked up in the voice
conversation.”2. Rembach is right. Customer effort is not a metric easily calculated
and most of customer effort is a balance of frequency and emotion. Customer
effort, or customer level of effort (CLE), is found in words and phrases such as:• Ridiculous.
• Crazy.
• Hard.
• Complicated.
• Stupid.
For retailers, customer effort is about creating lifetime value, says Chris Petersen in
the March 2018 commentary in Retail Customer Experience.
2 Rembach, Jim. Customer Think, Blinded Forever or Is Customer Effort Saved by AI Visibility (2018) https://
customerthink.com/blinded-forever-or-is-customer-effort-saved-by-ai-visibility/

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“Many retailers rarely ask these "effort" questions. Yet, they are at the very
core of the Goliath's strategy that is gobbling up customers at an amazing rate…
Increasingly, the "effort" required on the part of the customer is as importantas product and price.”3
9. Call dispositioning
Customers don’t typically dislike the service in one channel or another, it is the“runaround” effort of bouncing between channels, the lack of process followthrough and the deficiency of agent knowledge.
One of the most common requests of a speech analytics project is “I need speech
analytics to show me the reason people are calling.” For decades, call dispositioning
has been attempted with varying levels of success in CRM screens and automaticcall distributor (ACD) call codes. Symptoms of poor call dispositioning are agents:• Classifying 89 percent of calls as “miscellaneous” or “customer service.”• Choosing not to use any type of call dispositioning to save time.
• Struggling to choose between varying call reasons on the same call.
• Having trouble understanding complex codes or call types in a never-ending treeof call disposition codes.
The knowns: Speech analytics can be used to classify interactions with “known”
call reason codes by building Smart Views associated with terms for that reason
and tagging interactions for further analysis and reporting.
The unknowns: Advanced speech tools can also be used to analyze the “unknown”
reasons for a call that are deeper than the basic reason code. For example, thereason code could be “product return” for returning a purchase; however, thereason for the return may be trapped deeper in CRM with other codes not identified
in the call codes. Organizations can leverage speech to build related concept maps
and let the solution build out the “unknown” factors in the initial codes.
Faulty math: With most methods, a call has a single disposition code. The sum of allinteraction codes should match the overall call volume. With speech analytics, aninteraction can have multiple call types and reveal interactions that warrant several
reason codes. Users must ensure this is clear when sharing data.

3 Petersen, Chris. Retail Customer Experience, The horse you rode in on will not win the race for the future (2018)https://www.retailcustomerexperience.com/blogs/
the-horse-you-rode-in-on-will-not-win-the-race-for-the-future/

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10. Net Promoter Score (NPS) validation
Should customer ‘willingness to recommend’ data go to the boardroom, themarketing department or the contact center floor? The answer is “all of the above.”
Detractors in NPS are more likely to churn than promoters. In fact, 50 percent of
NPS detractors are likely to churn within the next 90 days.4 If this figure is shared in
the boardroom, the organization is missing the action needed in the contact center.
If the contact center can’t resolve some of the frustration, customers will headtoward the exits.
Speech analytics can reveal the reason for a customer’s unhappiness. This enables
organizations to use the feedback customers provide.
Promoters: Users can link NPS promoters to their verbatim survey comments, or
better yet, to the entire interaction. They can link call disposition codes mentioned
above with the score and let conceptual matching and sentiment reveal what partof their organization makes the promoters feel special.
Detractors: Users can perform the same exercise with detractors, looking forways to personalize their response. Follow-up should not be defensive or out ofcontext, but rather a conversation should start to listen, resolve their issue andtrack success.

4 Severson, Dana. INC, How a Detractor Can Damage Your Company (2016) https://www.inc.com/dana-severson/
how-a-detractor-can-damage-your-company.html

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11. Pulling calls for coaching vs. pushing moments that demand attention
Random coaching practices are prevalent and purposeful across the contact center
industry today.
BeforeAfter:

Three times a month a coach will:

Two times a month a coach will:• Evaluate random examples, longer than • Evaluate interactions received in
60 seconds to ensure fairness.
queue that have been tailored to thecoaching plan.
• Assess the most recent calls so the
topic is fresh on the employee’s mind. • Receive calls with problematic
workflows or topics.
• Avoid calls that might make theemployee feel pressured.
• Get scorecard data based on 100%of the interactions in order to spot
trends and take advantage of areasof opportunity.

Speech analytics should be used to target coachable interactions. OpenText uses
evaluation plans, which are custom-filtered evaluation plays that set:
• Topics based on interactions tagged by speech analytics, surveys or metadata.
• The frequency of coaching for that agent group.
• The distribution of coaching work across a QM team, team leaders or coaches.
• Injected calibration interactions that insure consistency of coaching.
Coaches can start with topics from section one of this document and should
always use a balanced mix of calls that warrant praise and demand correction.
“Pushing” interactions for coaching should be laser-focused on the desired
business outcomes and employee behavior.
12. Analytics-driven quality monitoring
For measurement purposes, the number of interactions typically observed as partof a traditional QA model do not represent a statistically valid sample set. Simply
put, most contact centers score a sample of interactions, and this study is used toestimate the score for all interactions of the same type, for the same group or forthe same agent. When using a sample to make inferences about the entire set ofinteractions, larger sample sizes will consistently result in a more precise estimate.
Using one or two recordings per week may be enough to facilitate an effective
coaching session with an agent. But just a few interactions out of hundreds is notreally a fair and valid measure, especially when such a small sample is used toaffect an employee performance review and/or compensation or when the sample
is being used to make critical and costly business decisions.

All recordedinteractions

20 speech analytics use cases to help you succeed

3%
Measuredusing
QA process3%
Measuredusing
surveys

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Using fewer samples also hinders a contact center’s ability to include samplesof every kind of interaction in the dataset. For example, a contact center agent
may handle a mixture of sales, fulfillment, billing and return authorization calls
throughout the course of a month. If the QA team was staffed to coach the agent
on just three calls that month, the agent’s quality score for that month would bebased on a dataset that did not include a sample of at least one type of interaction.
Furthermore, it would be inferred that the agent’s performance was consistent on
all types of calls, even though all types of calls were not included in the study. The
same could be said about not including samples of calls collected at different times
during the day or work week or not including samples of calls of various durations
or complexity.
An analytics-enabled contact scoring platform can provide additional andsignificant visibility into contact center performance and the customer
experience—insights not available via traditional measurement methods. With
the right solution, this unique measurement process can be highly flexible andeasily configured to measure a variety of business objectives. In most cases, themeasurement of agent script adherence, agent skills proficiency and customer
experience can be automated with speech analytics and this type of analysis canbe leveraged against all recorded interactions instead of a few manually-selectedcontact recordings or just a few customer survey responses. A fully-featured,analytics-enabled interaction scoring solution will typically allow contact center
users to:1. Create lists of words or phrases that, when spoken by the agent or the customer,
would indicate that a specific business objective has been partially or completely
met or not met.
2. Configure how the use of this language on the part of the agent or the customer
will affect the score of each interaction for that measurement category.
3.Select a group of interactions to measure for each category.
4.Validate results and tune the scoring tool to deliver a meaningful score.
5. Tune the analytics engine itself to ensure highest possible degree of
accuracy.
6. View scored results for all interactions by team, agent, site, type ofinteraction, line of business, etc.
7. Track adherence, skills and satisfaction trends over time and compare
relative performance across different contact center teams.
Of course, any analytics-enabled interaction scoring solution is only as accurate as
the analytics engine that powers it. Contact center analytics solutions are becoming
increasingly reliable, and as always, a few solutions consistently outperform others
in terms of implementation effort, speed of ingestion and output accuracy. Anyone
who has implemented an analytics tool knows to expect a great deal of fine-tuning
and customization and that no analytics solution can measure everything.
As with any new performance measurement tool, agents and their leaders must
acquire some degree of comfort with the dataset before the organization can
successfully be held accountable to a different system of measurement. In the caseof automatic scoring, it seems best to allow a generous test period, during whichtime the automatic scoring solution can be fine-tuned and reconciled with current
measurement results.

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13. Automating traditional QA scoring
Some analytics-enabled solutions on the market have been advertised as acomplete replacement to a traditional QA model, and examples have been madeof contact center organizations that have abandoned their manual QA process
in favor of an automated solution. Conversely, contact centers could view the
emergence of automatic scoring technology as an opportunity to augment andimprove upon their current measurement process.
Much of the quality and adherence data gathered by contact centers using manual
methods could be gathered using an automated process. If a contact center uses
a fully-featured, analytics-enabled QA solution powered by a high-performing
analytics engine, the data will be collected using a consistent set of standards
that the user can configure, test, validate and adjust as needed to ensure the mostaccurate results.
Analytics-driven scoring, linked to a question in a traditional QA form, cansupplement your existing processes to:• Reduce overall evaluation time.
• Increase overall coaching.
• Pinpoint timestamps in the interaction for coaching based on analytics.
• Save time by automatically marking questions “not-applicable” based on results.
• Provide on-the-fly results of all interactions (Use case No. 12) inside ofa scorecard.
14. Reducing employee effort
Organizations continue to drive change and attempt to cut costs. These
cost-cutting measures should never be done without considering positive andnegative effects on workplace culture. Employees should feel positively motivatedto support decisions and commit to the change that drives cost reductions.
These efforts are likely to succeed when leaders make positive motivation an
integral part of the process.

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They can start by listening to employees. Speech analytics reveals the employee’s
side of the story with searches such as:• My system.
• My computer• In my system.

“Speech analytics
provides compellinginsights to customer
effort and employee
effort. If customer service
professionals spend
significant effort inusing multiple disjointed
systems and workarounds
to do their job, you will
have unhappy employees
resulting in employee
churn. Not only that,• Please hold.
• I don’t see the same thing as you do.
• Running slow.
• I/We can’t do that.
The pain caused by applications is easy to hear and often referred to as “mysystem” or “my computer” by an agent. These include:• Complexity of screens or steps in a process.
• Network or computing bottlenecks that lead to slow response.
• Alternate views of data compared to the customer view, for example statements
vs. CRM or advertising vs. promo codes.
Customer view

Employee view

$5 kit promo offer

the next generationof employees (often
referred to as GenerationZ) crave meaningful
work and demand that

Website: mycompany.com/promo

organizations have

Promo Code: ONEDAY0717

the right tools andExpires Dec. 31

technology in place
before they arrive.”

Leaders should identify these issues, classify the interactions and present thedata to management. With these insights, organizations can ensure that front-line
leaders’ actions appeal to employees’ hearts and minds.

Roger Lee, aka Dr. WFOPrincipal Evangelist
Contact Center Advocates, LLC

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15. Agent training
Coaching employees to deliver an amazing customer experience isn’t as easy a paton the back. Coaching and training require thoughtful insights and an objective
and meaningful conversation about performance. Speech analytics combined with
automatic scoring can identify the agents that require training and maximize theefficiency of team members that are already proficient.
As buzzwords like machine learning and artificial intelligence swirl around theindustry, now is the time to look beyond the hype and discover real solutions tostrengthen quality monitoring methods that drive cross-generational employee
engagement. Now is the time to upgrade the coaching experience—for theemployee and evaluator.
Trainers can also take advantage of best practice call libraries, as otherwise,
finding the right call with the right topic and the right best practice can be daunting.
Trainers and coaches can leverage call classifications within speech analytics tofind best practices.
16. Average handle time (AHT) reduction
TechTarget defines AHT as, “a call center metric for the average duration of one
transaction, typically measured from the customer's initiation of the call andincluding any hold time, talk time and related tasks that follow the transaction.”5
Simply using AHT on its own does not tie back revenue growth, customer retention,customer satisfaction (CSAT) or NPS to the overall picture. Speech analytics
can help organizations identify outliers by range. They can start by grouping
interactions in the tool by duration and then leverage conceptual identification to
do the heavy lifting. Patterns in longer calls can offer a quick teachable moment.
Understanding long calls also helps identify what customers are really trying
to accomplish. A long call might be full of idle chat, but it might also be
rapport-building on the part of the agent. Agents need coaching to find thebalance between rapport-building and accomplishing the task. Using clear
examples, like the evaluation plans mentioned in No. 11, can help coaches
push those interactions for evaluation
5 TechTarget, A Guide to call center metrics (2006) https://searchcrm.techtarget.com/definition/
average-handle-time

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17. First contact resolution (FCR) improvements
FCR is a longstanding contact center metric that is often plagued with calculation
errors, disagreements and confusion. Regardless of the calculation method,organizations do monitor repeat callers for a reason—customers don’t like to callrepeatedly and not handling the issue on the first contact comes at a cost. Speech
analytics takes the guessing out of FCR by searching for key phrases such as:• Second time I’ve called.
• I’m calling again.
• The previous agent.
• I’ve been transferred.
Repeat callers often express frustration and speech analytics sentiment analysis
should be added to isolate specific issues. Organizations can track FCR issues
through speech analytics to find outliers, increase training, provide scripted
responses, update the knowledge base and to allow agents to move beyond their
AHT boundaries to resolve the call on the first attempt.

Turning compliance insights into action
18. Keeping out of trouble
Compliance in the contact center includes finding what is known, finding what is notknown and monitoring for exceptions. Finding what is known starts with searchingfor examples of fraud or compliance and using speech analytics to find specificexamples of a certain behavior. For example, speech analytics could be used to findinteractions where credit cards were mentioned and to verify that procedures arein place to keep credit card information safe.
Finding what is not known is the most common use case for speech analytics
and can be used to search for topics broadly and let concepts be exposed. As an
example, searching for “mortgage escrow” could reveal that specific disclosures
were not communicated properly when customers were angry.
Finally, monitoring for exceptions should be used in conjunction with No. 12 on thislist. Organizations can find a topic of compliance concern, use it for scoring the call,
add it to their monitoring form and then let speech analytics do the heavy lifting.
This allows coaches to spend more time coaching and less time double-checking
compliance triggers.
The benefits of compliance tracking include:• Complying with industry regulations.
• Reducing losses.
• Reducing callbacks to customers.
• Increasing the efficiency of the contact center.
• Improving customer sentiment
19. Managing compliance
Speech analytics can be used to alert the compliance officer. Organizations canleverage speech analytics to trigger alerts immediately after the occurrence
or in batches as needed (daily, weekly, monthly). Speech analytics can also taginteractions for follow-up. Having a place in the application for a complianceofficer to find examples should be simple and easy to use.
Simply finding a compliance violation is never enough. Speech analytics tagging,combined with quality management, allows companies to “push” interactions thatneed attention using evaluation plans.
20 speech analytics use cases to help you succeed

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20. Compliance and the customer experience
Compliance also has an impact on the overall customer experience. Negative press
because of PCI, HIPPA, GDPR or other PII violations is never a good thing. Speech
analytics helps organizations create smooth processes, target areas that require
heightened customer effort or dissatisfaction and put measures in place to fix them.
For example, the GDPR protects the personal information of EU residents, imposing
specific requirements upon those enterprises that collect and manage such data.

Assembling a successful speech analytics team
1. Create subject matter experts: Implementing speech analytics requires a teameffort. Large contact centers can find a core user who will be able to manage
the application and leverage their business acumen to find trends and help
other users. The quality monitoring team should also be equipped to handle the
set-up of evaluation plans to send interactions to the coaches. Bringing in speech
analytics as a benefit to the organization should be based on feedback fromsupervisors, agents and QM staff.
2. Establish a steering committee to monitor success: A speech analytics steeringcommittee should evaluate the use cases presented in this document alongwith other uses to make the most of a speech analytics investment. Mangers
should seek input from across the organization and appoint committee members
who can monitor progress. This process should include agents, as employee
engagement and employee effort are an integral part of the program success.
Employees will trust their peers and will be more accepting of process changes
down the path.
3.Evangelize the program and communicate success: After a steering committee
has been formed, champions should evangelize success. Once speech analytics
is shown to a broad audience, hands will raise from across the organization to
search for trends. The subject matter expert should be a great speaker and beable to present findings, even to an executive level.
4.Stay current with technology: As speech analytics is an ever-changing
technology, organizations should schedule regular checkups with their speech
analytics vendor. This may include adding new channels in the future, improving
accuracy and capturing the most from voice interactions, emails, chat, social
media and CRM notes.
If you would like additional information, please visit opentext.com/qfiniti.

About OpenText
OpenText, The Information Company, enables organizations to gain insight throughmarket leading information management solutions, on-premises or in the cloud. For
more information about OpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX) visit: opentext.com.

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