Whitepaper Examines How Agencies Can Harness Speech Analytics to Their Advantage

Conversations with consumers can be fraught with compliance trip-wires for collectors. From remembering all the disclosures necessary — mini-Miranda, recording disclosures (if necessary) — to maintaining one’s cool in sometimes fraught conversations, there are myriad opportunities for something to go wrong. When handled unsuccessfully, they can negatively impact the bottom line, as well as increase risk of fines and reputational damage for regulatory noncompliance.

In a whitepaper just published on insideARM.com (download here), FICO suggests that phonetics-based speech analytics might provide a scientific, scalable way of evaluating and improving conversations with consumers. In fact, they say that this technology is helping companies lower compliance risk while lifting agent productivity by double digits.

from the whitepaper:

How does phonetics-based speech analytics work?

Phonetics-based speech analysis finds patterns of sounds in speech. This powerful and flexible analytic method has several advantages for contact center management. These include real-time recognition of what agents and consumers are saying, as well as speed in adapting to new regulations and customer experience criteria.

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound capable of conveying a distinction in meaning in a language. For example, in English, the word “best” is formed by the phonemes /b/e/s/t/; swap the /b/ sound for an /r/ sound, and the resulting word “rest” has a different meaning. Changing the sequence of the phonemes in “task” (/t/a/s/k/) produces “asked” (/a/s/k/t/).Analytics that detect phonemes can recognize not only words, but phrases and sequences of phrases in contact center speech. By generating a phonetic index layered with a time-aligned index, this technology can also determine when, during the duration of a call, agents and consumers say specific things. For example, did a collections agent make the so-called “mini-Miranda” disclosure statement at the beginning of a call, and did she ask for full payment before suggesting a settlement? Did a sales agent make the most profitable offer first?