Why your business needs speech-to-text transcription
And why it’s far more than transcribing words on a page
Call transcription, often referred to as speech to text, is a method of recording conversations between customers and agents. Traditionally it required human intervention for the best results, but today’s technology can deliver accurate records and context-rich insights, and the use cases extend further than you might think.
Contact centers and customer-facing employees often have a difficult time keeping track of voice calls and their contents. Of course, agents can take notes after every call. And calls can be recorded and stored for training purposes, compliance, and legal requirements. But these notes aren’t always reliable, and recordings can be incredibly time-consuming to manage.
But it’s not just call archiving that transcription does successfully – it opens the door for a wide array of AI capabilities, from gathering intelligence and tracking customer satisfaction to supervision and compliance.
“…we need machine-learning models that can accurately translate the human voice – with all its nuances – into writing…”
Voice technology is the cornerstone of modern customer service. Many of the AI-driven features of CCaaS platforms, that businesses rely on each day, require a correct and complete transcript for every call. So, we need machine learning models that can accurately translate the human voice – with all its nuances – into writing. And that’s why we call it ‘speech to text’.
But how does speech to text unlock the promise of AI?
Today’s transcription software depends upon cutting-edge machine-learning models that, for a time, were so expensive to license that only the largest companies could benefit. But through demand for more widespread adoption, and with players like AWS, Google and Microsoft creating more democratized models, the cost is steadily reducing, and accuracy is improving. This democratization also means that AI technology has come a long way, offering call centers more capabilities than ever before.
We can analyze text from channels such as social media messaging and chatbot conversations. But nearly 90% of people still choose voice calls over other channels, so you’d be missing the opportunity to tap into extremely useful (and plentiful) data.
“…nearly 90% of people still choose voice calls over other channels…”
Once you’re able to convert speech to text, you can use AI to analyze conversations for business insights, more informed decision-making and a better gauge of how well your employees are performing.
But, better still, what if you could have a live view of your customer data? Well, now you can.
Real-time speech to text has its own special use cases. If you can reap the rewards of transcription instantaneously, you create opportunities for immediate in-call analysis and supervision. For example, an agent dealing with an angry or hostile customer might get flustered and feel unsure how to proceed. To stop things escalating, real-time transcription can help us flag the use of profanities and any aggressive language. This filter would trigger an action behind the scenes, such as allowing a supervisor to listen in on the conversation and offer guidance, or simply terminating the call to protect the agent.
Thrio makes the most of transcription by combining it with an increasing list of capabilities enabled by our AI engines and models.
So, what are the benefits to your business?
Insights and understanding
When it comes to delivering top-tier service, you need to know how your customers are feeling and how your employees are performing. Whether it’s being aware of trends and demands, or identifying areas for improvement, your success relies on having a good understanding of what’s happening on customer calls day to day.
Transcription can deliver these insights, automatically generating a huge set of data for analysis. But it’s what you do with this data that really counts. Thrio makes these insights useful and actionable, helping you improve service and streamline processes. That might mean sampling interactions for supervision, workforce optimization reporting, or automatically creating call summaries to cut notetaking time for agents.
The platform’s robust architecture has allowed us to incorporate transcription in a way that’s easy to use and cost-effective. We take care of licensing, so you don’t need to take on additional vendors. And we’ve also ensured it’s future-proof and flexible, so we can seamlessly integrate new solutions as the market changes and technology evolves.
Sentiment analysis
If customer satisfaction is your aim, it’s important to have a sense of the customer’s tone of voice when they’re speaking to your agents. We call this sentiment analysis – essentially, we’re looking to find out whether the caller’s point of view is positive, neutral, or negative. But we can go one step beyond that and find out if they’re satisfied, disappointed, or frustrated. And as we’ve already discussed, we can keep agents safe from situations that could become heated or uncomfortable.
“…Thrio’s AI engine uses a natural language understanding (NLU) model to help it assign intent to the words it records…”
On the other hand, it’s useful to know what language people respond best to, what your agents are doing well and anything they should be doing more of. Thrio’s AI engine uses a natural language understanding (NLU) model to help it assign intent to the words it records. This helps you track customer satisfaction and gain a better understanding of what your customers want, what they really dislike, and how to resolve their queries better.
Entity detection
In the same way that we can use AI to detect and react to the caller sentiment, we can also pinpoint certain words and phrases that reflect classifications relevant to your business. We call this entity detection.
For example, if you’re a travel agency and most of your calls are related to flights and hotels, but you want to identify calls that reference car hire, you could easily do so. In this case the entity would be ‘car hire.’ Of course, you could just use it as a keyword to search for relevant calls within your records. But in combination with powerful process automation, you could go one step further and, for example, send relevant follow up emails – in real time.
But it’s not always this straightforward. Industry-specific terms pose a unique challenge. Legal and medical, for example, are especially nuanced areas of language where context is key. That’s why we have industry-specific machine learning models for these markets. We also built tooling into Thrio that allows customers to customize their model to ensure phrases are transcribed and interpreted in the right way.
Compliance and supervision
Wherever agents are representing your business, they’ll be responsible for upholding compliance, following regulations and keeping the quality of service consistently high. If your agents aren’t performing as they should be, their actions could have a negative impact on your reputation, as well as legal ramifications.
Transcription makes it possible to efficiently recognize agents that aren’t meeting your standards or have trouble staying on-script and completing any mandatory disclosures. Once identified, these agents can receive additional support and supervision – helping you manage the quality of service and keep your customers happy.
With Thrio, you not only enjoy well-integrated transcription, but you’re given all the benefits of the AI engines that use speech to text to optimize processes, improve agent performance and power friction-free customer journeys – all from one easy-to-use platform.