As more CCaaS providers include speech analytics as part of their offerings, investing in a full speech analytics solution may seem excessive. Why purchase an entire solution when it’s included in my CCaaS platform?
In our most recent blog post, we explained why a dedicated speech analytics solution offers more benefits than CCaaS speech analytics. But with so many providers out there, it’s difficult for businesses to choose the solution that best fits their needs. That’s why we’re giving you these guidelines for evaluating speech analytics solutions.
We’ve organized this guide into a series of questions to ask as you start comparing solutions.
Is the Solution Affordable & Scalable?
In the past, only large businesses and contact centers could afford a speech analytics solution. Most of these solutions required extensive hardware and software installation, as well as additional IT resources to manage the technology. However, with the growing prominence of cloud-based solutions, more businesses can afford what was once a luxury.
What Are the Key Features?
There are a few key features to look for when comparing pricing. While most speech analytics solutions include a wide range of features, it’s best to focus on the features most relevant to your business during your evaluation. Will you need scorecards, for instance, or sentiment analysis? Or are you looking for a basic solution that transcribes call recordings without the bells and whistles? Find out what features are offered, and make sure you have an understanding of each one and its benefits.
How Flexible Is the Solution?
In addition to key features, you’ll want to consider scalability. Meaning, is the solution flexible enough to scale up or down as your needs change? For instance, if the pricing is partially based on call volume, can you easily change your plan if your call volume changes? Be sure to ask! Otherwise, you’re stuck with paying for much more than you might need.
How Soon Will You Get Your ROI?
The other deciding factor for many companies is how quickly they can see a return on their investment. With most solutions, you can expect a return on investment in three to twelve months. Some solutions, on the other hand, provide a much faster ROI – in as little as 2 weeks in some cases. Make sure you ask when you can expect your ROI before making your decision.
Do You Need or Want Real-Time Analytics?
We recently covered the issues with real-time speech analytics in our post, What They Don’t Tell You About Real-Time Speech Analtyics. What you should know for our purposes here is that real-time speech analytics creates more problems than it solves. If you’re looking for a solution that offers real-time analytics, make sure you understand the caveats that come with it.
What Insights Will You Get?
The ability to analyze customer calls so that you can easily understand the voice of your customers is perhaps the biggest benefit of a speech analytics solution; however, without access to actionable insights, you won’t reap many of those benefits. Now, you might see the term, “actionable insights” tossed around a lot, and it can have different meanings. For our purposes here, actionable insights include any information that you can act on to increase your bottom line, improve customer service, or any other areas you want to improve in your business.
Ultimately, you want the insights that matter most to you; therefore, you need a solution that allows you to manipulate the call data into scorecards and insights dashboards that meet your specific business requirements.
What Are the Search Capabilities?
The solution should make it easy to constantly refine your searches for a clearer understanding of the insights you’ll gain. Even if your vendor offers built-in “Phrase Libraries” designed for your industry, you should still have the ability to fine-tune those for your specific markets, products, and customers. Your solution will still require some refining and a results assessment process for your searches. This is why it’s important to understand the nuances of MSaaS vs. SaaS solutions.
How Accurate is the Solution?
While no speech analytics solution is 100% accurate, it is possible to achieve accuracy rates up to 90% or more depending on several factors.
Here are a few of those factors:
- Quality of the initial sample set of audio recordings
- Regional accents and speaking pace
- Amount of overtalk
- Background noise and quality of headsets, etc.
It’s important to note that some of these factors can be mitigated with features like silence and overtalk detection. It is also important to keep in mind that there will always be a margin of error because technology is never 100% perfect.
What Level of Support Will You Get?
However, if you work with a vendor that offers Managed Client Services, then you’ll achieve much higher accuracy rates through fine-tuning results with your support team. Not every speech analytics solution offers this, so make sure you understand the level of support you get with your solution.
How Difficult Is It to Integrate the Solution?
This is a very important question to consider. While many speech analytics providers will tell you that their solution is “easy to integrate,” that’s often not the case. Your speech analytics software should be easy enough for anyone at your company to use. Having a user-friendly, cloud-based dashboard and easy-to-use platform is essential to the success of your solution. It should not require technical expertise, additional IT resources, or significant changes to your tech stack.
Ready to See Why Businesses Choose CallFinder Speech Analytics?
CallFinder is known as the leading speech analytics provider for businesses of all sizes because of our scalability, affordability, and our Managed Client Support. Request a short demo to see how CallFinder’s solution can help your business.
