Published on the 04/12/2019 | Written by Heather Wright

We’ve got the recordings, now what can we do with them?…

Voice data offers a potential gold mine of information for businesses who are keen to harness the information hidden in phone calls, but a new report shows it’s an untapped area for most.

The report – from Dubber, an Australian company which, surprise, surprise, enables voice data capture – shows nine out of 10 Australian workers believe applying insights from voice data would be helpful. But just 36 percent of Australian’s working in IT are doing so.

The survey, which polled 2,500 workers across Australia (850), the UK and the US found 51 percent of the Aussie managers had experienced miscommunications with colleagues or clients due to a lack of an information trail, while 49 percent said they’d lost or forgotten important information because it wasn’t captured.

Speech intelligence is the final frontier of data to be mobilised for strategic purposes.

When it came to what people felt voice data could be useful for, 55 percent wanted to be able to easily search past phone calls for keywords, while 52 percent said it would help reduce risk, monitor processes and eliminate errors in details and communication within the office environment. Identifying instructions and automatically scheduling meetings was also a popular option, along with saving phone numbers and key details or entering addresses into maps.

Call recording isn’t new, of course. Anyone who has rung a call centre will have experienced the recorded message announcing your call is being recorded for training and quality control purposes. And despite the move to digital interactions it’s still a growth market, with reports forecasting a CAGR of around 16 percent between 2018 and 2028, when the global market is expected to hit US$5.3 billion.

The trick now, lies in doing more with the information collected.

Steve McGovern, Dubber CEO says speech intelligence is a new field of analytics and ‘the final frontier’ of data to be mobilised for strategic purposes.

“It can unlock detailed information on consumer sentiment, issues management, call outcomes and many other variables, helping dive better customer service, improving knowledge of client needs and ultimately increasing business performance,” McGovern says.

“There is so much potential, yet voice data is often excluded from conversations around transformation and big data. As Industry 4.0’s technologies advance, businesses need to advance with it and begin to capture valuable insights through their business conversations.”

Modor Intelligence has forecast the speech analytics market to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 21.6 percent from 2019-2024, to US$3.6 billion, up from US$1.1 billion in 2018.

It says cloud based communications analytics in particular are being adopted by companies as a way to identify potential risks with real time insights into customers.

Retail and banking sectors, with high demand to improve customer retention, are among those at the forefront globally.

Cruise company Holland America Line has publicly credited speech analytics and call recording with helping its business, from simplifying and improving its website and processes to how it coaches agents, providing significant savings for the company and improved customer experience.

The company began using call analytics when it was experiencing long call handle times following website issues. The analytics enabled the company to pinpoint issues with the websites and how call centre staff were handling the calls.

In Dubber’s world, meanwhile, voice AI transcribes calls, analyses content to gain understanding of trends and customer sentiment or in the case of financial services to enable advisors to plan for customer advice and adjust service portfolios. Keywords are tracked to monitor, for example, what products need to be ordered to stay ahead of customer demand.

But is the workforce happy for calls to be tracked?

The Dubber survey shows Australians working in IT were slightly happier than their non-IT workers to have their work phone record and analyse their conversations to assist in making immediate decisions at 66 percent versus 46 percent.

Outside of our work, we’re apparently more comfortable with calls being recorded – 86 percent said they were comfortable having calls recorded for improving customer service and fraud reduction reasons, with 77 percent saying recording for training purposes was fine, and 72 percent ok with recording to help a business improve operations.