Speech analytics explained: how to turn conversations into insights

The average contact center handles 4,400 calls every month—yet sifting through them to find the conversations that matter is slow and tedious. Reviewing just a single 6-minute call can often take over 20 minutes, stretching already limited time and resources. 

This is where speech analytics comes in. The right speech analytics solution helps you turn customer interactions into valuable insights so you can understand them better and prevent churn.

This article covers:

• What speech analytics is

• How it works

• The benefits of speech analysis for contact centers

• How a company turned conversation into action

Key insights

• Speech analytics uses AI to detect sentiment, intent, and context, helping teams understand not just what customers say, but how they feel and why that matters 

• Conversation intelligence builds on speech analytics to connect insight into action. Analyzing all forms of conversation, from voice to chatbot to email, teams connect insights to support, product, and digital journeys to create a 360-degree view of their customers.

• Speech analytics improves both customer experience (CX) and agent performance. The same insights that surface customer signals also highlight coaching opportunities and best-practice behaviors, making it a shared tool across CX, quality assurance (QA), and operations.

What is speech analytics?

Speech analytics is the process of transforming audio into usable text, which is then analyzed for patterns and deeper meaning.

Speech analysis tools use speech recognition, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning (ML) to perform this process. The result is valuable customer data that helps your team better understand your customers’ sentiments, intents, and needs.

Additionally, speech analytics makes recorded calls easily searchable. This is a game-changer for organizations that store thousands of customer call recordings but have little ability to use that data at scale.

Speech analytics vs. conversation intelligence: what’s the difference?

• Conversation intelligence analyzes and reports on the data gathered from every customer interaction across all your support channels, like chatbots

• Speech analytics, on the other hand, analyzes your calls and turns them into text to more easily extract data. Speech analytics is a foundational element of any conversation intelligence platform. 

Loris, recently acquired by Contentsquare, is an AI conversation intelligence platform that uses speech analytics to provide targeted sentiment detection. The platform allows QA analysts and customer experience (CX) leaders to rapidly determine customer sentiment and needs, whether it’s toward your product, company, policies, or agents. 

Contentsquare’s Conversation Intelligence analyzes not only voice but also text-based conversations, such as chat and email conversations, to uncover drivers, sentiment, root cause, and performance across human and artificial intelligence (AI) agents.

The product also delivers immediate feedback for additional use cases, such as auto QA for agents and voice-of-customer (VoC) analysis.

How AI in speech analytics works

Speech analytics platforms leverage AI to understand, process, and analyze conversations. Here’s how it works:

1. Recording: the platform receives a recording from an organization’s phone or customer service interaction platform. All customer conversations are captured to have complete coverage and insight.

2. Data processing: the platform uses speech recognition, transcription, and diarization to turn the audio recording into a usable, text-based transcript 

3. Analysis: the call is then run through AI and ML models to generate metadata, such as intent tagging/reasons for contact, customer sentiment, conversation quality, and other business-critical data points.

4. Insights: the platform then delivers detailed reports on its analysis, including information about call quality, customer sentiment, agent performance, and compliance

How AI speech analysis transforms call center performance

Speech analytics platforms that harness the power of AI provide richer, more accurate data on aspects such as customer mood and sentiment throughout various stages of a conversation.

With AI-powered conversation intelligence, you’ll automatically discover and analyze words, phrases, and categories that give you direct insight into the customer experience.

AI speech analysis tools allow for quicker analysis, analyzing calls in real time and providing immediate insights. This saves valuable time for your analysts, so they can work on more strategic projects, while ensuring your operations run more efficiently. 

You also get structured information about

• Common topics and conversational themes

• Trending issues

• Emerging issues

• Conversation snippets for context

• Sentiment and contact drivers

• Competitor mentions

AI speech analytics platforms help you identify the conversations that matter most, helping you meet customer needs and drive greater business impact.

For example, if your speech analytics platform reveals that a high volume of customers are calling to flag an issue with a specific product feature, you know you need to pass this insight on to your product development team to get it fixed, fast.

📣 You can still listen to calls 

There are probably instances where you’ll still want to listen to at least a portion of calls or read a section of chat or email transcripts. An AI-powered conversation intelligence platform pinpoints which conversations, in addition to which parts of it, warrant a closer review.

For some organizations, this first-hand, qualitative VoC insight is an essential part of understanding their customer experience. For others, having the data tell them which issues and agents are having the biggest impact on customers removes the need for this additional step.

The benefits of speech analytics 

These are a few ways businesses benefit from using speech analytics, backed by AI. 

1. Improve the customer experience

A single bad experience is often all it takes—87% of customers say they’ll leave a business because of it. 

AI speech analytics helps teams get ahead of churn by using real-time sentiment analysis to uncover what’s driving customer frustration and satisfaction—as conversations happen. 

2. Improve your product experience 

Speech analytics doesn’t just optimize contact center performance—it can also reveal system issues affecting your entire business. From product gaps to policy friction, customer conversations highlight where change is needed the most in your business.

For example, if payment-related calls suddenly increase, speech analytics helps pinpoint whether the issue is technical, usability-related, or policy-driven, so the right team can fix the right problem, faster.

3. Make your QA more efficient

We all know manual quality assurance is time-consuming. Having to transcribe calls and then sift through each one makes the process inefficient and slow. With speech analytics, you give time back to your team, reducing the intensive QA process and maximizing operational efficiency.

4. Provide better coaching

Agent performance is often at the top of the list of call center priorities. Your contact center agents need regular coaching to help them perform better and deliver more positive services to your customers.

Speech analytics platforms analyze every call and provide rich insights into each one. This then helps inform how you coach each agent, based on real data, so you can create custom and tailored coaching sessions.

Success story: how Loris helped BILL with targeted sentiment detection

BILL, a financial operations platform, found its customer base growing at a rapid rate and wanted to ensure it could keep up with that growth. 

The company set out to make customer service a true competitive advantage, not simply a support function. By giving its agents best-in-class tools, they aimed to elevate every customer interaction. 

With Loris, BILL could turn that vision into a reality. Here’s how:

• Agents now understand customer sentiment in real time, allowing them to respond more effectively and deliver better experiences, in the moment

• Loris provides BILL agents with customized template suggestions, helping them shift conversations from negative into positive experiences for their customers

• Additionally, with Loris, BILL’s leaders can quickly find important conversations, identify underlying and emerging issues, and rectify them before they become larger problems

Speak to a Loris expert today

Using advanced speech analytics and sentiment detection, Loris helps you monitor and analyze customer sentiment in real time. 

This means better customer service, improved business operations, a more efficient QA process, and better-trained agents.

Visit our website today to speak to a Loris expert and learn how our platform can help you improve the customer experience with speech analytics and targeted sentiment detection.

FAQs about speech analytics