Speech analytics applications have been helping to improve customer interactions since the first commercially available solution was launched in the early 2000s. Since then, speech analytics has grown rapidly, as brands seek differentiation through enhanced customer experience. Although the use of digital channels is growing rapidly, voice is still the preferred medium for customers.

Speech analytics enables the transcription of voice calls, and so can unlock valuable data and information that otherwise would be hidden in a voice conversation. But it goes further than just transcribing voice calls. Speech analytics applications now have the ability to ‘understand’ the tone and meaning of a conversation and provide deep insights, trends, and metrics from each call.

AI and speech analytics: A powerful combination

In recent years, speech analytics has evolved to utilise artificial intelligence (AI), which provides advanced capabilities such as natural language processing (NLP) and advanced speech recognition technologies to understand nuances, emotions, and frequently used vocabulary to analyse each call and then derive actional insights from the conversation.

Speech analytics improves the experience of employees and customers, and offers the following benefits:

• Identifies and reduces points of high customer effort.
• Provides quality assurance for legal compliances and data security.
• Helps employees to better curate their conversations and drive customer satisfaction.
• Improves employee experience by automating time-consuming and tedious tasks such as text and data entry.
• Enhances employee coaching and performance.

But recent advances in AI take those capabilities one step further. The recent release of OpenAI’s fourth-generation Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) series, known as GPT-4, could be set to revolutionise customer insights.

OpenAI’s latest GPT-4 release raises the bar for customer interactions

GPT-4 was launched in March 2023, and was made available to the public in the form of ChatGPT. GPT-4 though is a powerful AI platform that can be adapted for different applications. It turns unstructured data (such as a voice conversation) into structured data, and provides actionable insights and suggestions.

GPT-4 enables more sophisticated analysis of conversations. For example, it can summarise conversations, extract meaning, provide insight, and suggest actions. It even allows users to ask questions and receive meaningful responses in a structured format. For example, an employee can ask: “What was the customer’s request or problem?” and GPT-4 will provide a summary of a 30-minute conversation in two sentences.

Other questions might include: “What procedure changes could the company implement to avoid this type of customer call?”, or: “What can the company do to make customer conversations like this shorter and make it easier for customers to solve this type of problem?”

GPT4 not only provides a response, but it also makes actionable suggestions in a clear and concise format. It can also transform unstructured data into structured data by identifying “action items” that can be consumed by other applications, such as sending a calendar invite for the next meeting at a given time and date to a defined group of people. Or identify allocated tasks and assign them to the right person in an application.

Another important aspect is GPT-4’s extended call length – longer calls have been a challenge – for example, GPT3.5 can only support 30-minute calls. GPT-4 extends the length of a call that can be analysed to 4 hours.

Touch can offer GPT capabilities and legal compliance

Importantly, a potential issue for European customers is that OpenAI GPT services are hosted in US data centres, which could be problematic in terms of General Data Protection Act (GDPR) compliance.

The Schrems II ruling by the Court of Justice of the EU in July 2020 emphasised the robust due diligence that organisations need to take before transferring personal data outside of the European Economic Area.

Touch guarantees that our deliveries for European customers with enhanced GPT speech analytics, will be in compliance with GDPR.

So, if you’re a large enterprise looking for Speech Analytics service, contact Touch today to find out more.