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Speech Analytics has moved away from the must-have list to mainstream acceptance with 82% deployment across Opus Research respondents. Even among the non-adherents, almost 48% were ready for deployment within 6 months to 1 year. But the goal posts have been shifting with an organizational focus on improving customer experiences and driving Speech Analytics adoption.
Compliance needs that were touted as one of the main reasons for deployment is yesterday’s news. Now, number of businesses are adopting Speech Analytics to empower customer journeys, marketing efforts, employee training, and cost efficiencies.
Primary Reason to Deploy Speech Analytics (All Respondents)
Customer data along with the customer insights are the new oil for businesses. Organizations are capitalizing on Speech Analytics intelligence to understand market needs and new disruptions in the industry. Business decision makers are analyzing customer conversation patterns to assist decision-making systems, product planning, agent training, workflow management, cost management, and core competency development.
For the same reason, regional differences for Speech Analytics adoption have been blurring. Quick ID of customer intention, understanding customer engagement, fraud detection, and support for marketing initiatives have been top drivers.
Primary Reason to Deploy (By Region)
57% of the South East Asian and 37% of North American businesses cited Speech Analytics as the major catalyst for data driven marketing blitzkriegs. The Quick ID of customer intentions and understanding the CX failures give clear insights to marketing and product and cost planning. Almost half of the North American respondents are actively adopting Speech Analytics intelligence to understand customer and workforce chatter, optimize workflows, cost management, and sales pushes. This metric is also significant across the European and South Asian markets.
Primary Reasons to Deploy Speech Analytics (By Industry)
The eagerness to map customer journeys, intent, and experiences is showing a similar uptick across industry verticals. Banking, Financial Services, Business Process Outsourcing, and Insurance companies are incorporating Speech Analytics into their strategic business processes at a faster rate. 54% of BPOs are actively using Speech Analytics insights to support their marketing initiatives. 50% of financial services, 52% insurance and 48% of BPOs focus on understanding customer intents with 46% banking respondents focused on fraud analytics.
Factors Cited as Barriers to Deployment (ALL)
Despite the positive trends, the barriers and concerns continue to remain consistent across verticals and geographies. Close to 30% fear giving in to the hype and cite the limited number of applications as the major stumbling block to widespread implementations. A large majority (16%-20%) is concerned about the costs and equally feels that the existing KPIs cannot reflect the benefits accrued over time. But there has been a positive shift towards adoption in 2018 with more and more companies fine-tuning deployment, management, and measurement.
The Indian market does vary considerably in terms of key drivers for adoption with 72% focusing on real-time intervention and remediation leading the list. The need to understand the impact of specific features (63%) and intelligent authentication of callers (60%) are other factors that drive deployment. Training WFO agents and ID of customer intent fall below the half-way mark for Indian business needs. However, the concerns of Indian businesses remain in sync with the global partners.
Biggest Opportunities for Deploying Speech Analytics (All)
There is strong evidence that Speech Analytics is regarded as the path breaker for more intelligent assistants, virtual agents, and Chatbots. 72% of businesses expect Speech Analytics to foster real-time customer care with cross sell and upsell opportunities. 58% want integration with multi-channel customer support followed by self-service enterprise virtual assistance (54%).
Beyond ‘BPO’ centric deployment …
With data becoming the goldmine, Conversational Analytics has moved ahead of being BPO centric deployment. Businesses are looking at long term benefits of mining speech data analytics. This will ultimately impact the positioning of the product and enable decision makers to develop strategies keeping ahead of the disruption curve. The road ahead is no more myopic, it is driven by the next wave of technology conversational Analytics. The power of ‘Big Data’ and AI enabled chatbots, Conversational Assistant and Conversational Security have increased the momentum of the deployment of Conversational analytic.
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