By Donna Fluss
As consumers, we’re bombarded with marketing declaring that products are “new and improved,” which is frequently reinforced with updated packaging and a different name. However, we often discover the product hasn’t changed much – if at all. Is that the case with conversation analytics? Are these solutions the speech and text analytics applications we’ve known for decades, just with a different name? The answer is a resounding “no”!
Historical speech analytics, which has been commercially available for over 20 years, was a game-changer in its day. It provided rudimentary insights into the reasons customers called an organization based on keywords and later, key phrases. As natural language processing (NLP) capabilities advanced, so did speech—and text—analytics, delivering an expanded volume of data regarding customers, their sentiments and emotions, and more.
However, the addition of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technology means that these solutions are “new and improved.” The leading conversation analytics solutions now deliver essential, and increasingly meaningful data and insights the original applications were never intended to provide to users. These greatly enhanced solutions analyze both sides of entire conversations in any voice and digital channel, necessitating a name that better aligns with their advanced analytical capabilities. Today’s GenAI-enabled conversation analytics applications more accurately identify customer intents, detect a wide range of emotions, substantially enhance sentiment analysis, and correlate customer and employee behaviors with business outcomes.
However, many more benefits are being delivered by the new generation of conversation analytics solutions. Their underlying analytical capabilities also enable several related applications that elevate both the customer and employee experience (CX/EX) in multiple ways, including:
- Real-time guidance (RTG) While the primary objective of RTG is giving agents the contextual knowledge, procedures, and guidance to better assist customers during the first contact, these applications also reduce agent onboarding, training, and handling times, as well as boost employee engagement.
- Automated quality management (AQM) Conversation analytics enables organizations to automatically review up to 100% of their voice and digital customer interactions, up significantly from the 1% to 3% typically evaluated in a contact center’s manual QM program, and at considerable cost savings. AQM solutions can assess agent soft skills and knowledge gaps and recommend coaching and/or training sessions, frequently scheduling and delivering the content directly to the agent.
- Automated post-interaction summarization GenAI-based conversation analytics power the ability to extract customer intents, key entities, and interaction events from live conversations, creating a concise summary of the interaction in seconds. This eliminates the need for agents to manually perform these tasks and improves the summaries’ quality. Innovative applications can identify follow-up items from the conversation to help ensure customer commitments are met, or they can kick off automated workflows to complete the promised tasks.
The three applications described above each leverage GenAI-enhanced transcription as an underlying contributor to their processes. When GenAI is supported by an appropriately trained, curated, and maintained large language model (LLM), transcription accuracy undergoes ongoing improvement.
Conversation analytics solutions and the related applications they enable already add value and provide great benefits to customers, agents, and a company’s bottom line. Because continuous improvement is a core feature of GenAI-based solutions, they constantly get better on their own, but vendors aren’t stopping there, as additional enhancements are on their way. While more innovation is coming, these four categories of GenAI-enabled solutions – conversation analytics, RTG, AQM, and automated post-interaction summarization – are ready for mass adoption. DMG recommends that companies start with a small pilot or implementation of one of these applications to gain a level of comfort. Once its effectiveness is proven, move forward with a broader roll-out by taking the same approach with the next solution.
Donna Fluss, Founder and President of DMG Consulting LLC, provides a unique and unparalleled understanding of AI, people, processes, and technology that drive the strategic direction and performance of the dynamic and rapidly transforming contact center and back-office operations and markets. Donna can be reached at donna.fluss@dmgconsult.com.