How to Tell the Technicolored Story of Your Speech Data

Verint Team August 14, 2020

Transformco is a leading integrated retailer focused on seamlessly connecting the digital and physical shopping experiences to serve its members. Speech analytics is a key part of Transformco’s strategy.

The company launched Verint in 2016 with 150 speech categories in their library to enable nationwide sales operations. Kendra King, Director of Quality and Performance Management for Transformco, hosted a session at Verint Virtual to share tips on effective ways to display speech data.

In this blog, we will cover Kendra’s tips for setting the table for speech, how speech analytics helped Transformco adapt and respond to COVID-19, and presenting speech results.

Setting the Table for Speech

Kendra’s first tip on how get the most out of speech analytics is to teach speech, don’t preach speech.
A good initial step is to teach Speech 101 to tell leaders what speech looks like and gain a foundational understanding of the technology.

By helping team members understand what speech is and what it isn’t, and learn about the techniques and tools, such as how to build a category or what focused listening is, you can unlock its full benefits. When you educate the group listening to your presentations on what the powers of speech analytics are, it gives you a more holistic view than even customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys give, given CSAT polls a small sample while speech covers a larger group.

Speech gathers a lot of data about the voice of the customer (VoC), metrics such as average handle time (AHT) and other data in a very robust report.

Speech analytics ninjas analyse the data, connect the dots, and shine a spotlight on the findings in a straightforward way without getting caught up in the underpinnings of the data.

Speech Analytics and COVID-19

A great place to highlight the benefits of speech analytics is COVID-19, which has significantly changed Transformco’s daily business. Transformco offers in home services along with retail stores. Back in February, the company realized COVID-19 would be a pending issue and built a category around “social distancing” and “shelter in place.”

Speech analytics empowered Transformco to use straightforward analysis on a very complicated topic. How did the company do it? Transformco built a speech category for COVID-19 laser-focused on getting accurate, up-to-date information to customers and associates. Learn more about Verint’s Speech Analytics Programs.

The company wanted to take care of employees and customers. Of particular interest was the desire to hit these 5 points: review overall call volume on health concerns, hear the voice of the customer to hear their concerns, monitor how associates used resources available to them to focus on COVID-19, fill in the gaps to reveal coachable opportunities, and evolve the category for further study.

Presenting Speech Analytics Results

Speech analytics can provide a view into the complex worlds of sales, service, customer experience, and employee adherence to policies and procedures. With focused listening, Transformco was able to improve on these, but the way the information was presented was important.

As Kendra shared, one best practice for presenting results is using graphs and technicolored pictures. KISSING is a great acronym to live by when building speech analytics presentations: Keep It Simple Silly in Neat Graphs. The key to compelling presentations on complex data is to stick to simplicity and to draw the eye to key points.
She recommends embedding spreadsheets and reports into presentation decks rather than displaying them on the screen and attempting to go through them.

Another key recommendation is the rinse and repeat method, which means using a consistent speech format with repeated customer sentiment, quality criteria and customer philosophy. Then, revisit the greatest hits regularly in subsequent reporting. It’s also a good idea to begin with a focused intro slide where the goals of each study are clearly stated with details about the pool of calls analysed.

One example of a great speech analytics report is a sales opportunity and sales objection study. Sales leaders love to hear about objections, strategy adherence and overcoming customers’ questions, issues and concerns to make the sale.

Verint recording of speech analytics is robust, and a shared document about focused listening lets Transformco use the data in multiple ways to tell the story and connect the dots. The data is too dense to display to an audience, because most people would not know what to look at.

By distilling the data down to the key points, Transformco can truly get to the actionable insights from their speech data and merchandise it across the company for maximum impact.