If you work in a contact centre, you know quality assurance (QA) can often feel like a box-ticking exercise. Yet, QA is the backbone of exceptional customer service, agent development and operational efficiency. The challenge? Many QA processes are time-consuming, resource-intensive and limited in the insights they provide.
What if your QA process could do more? Imagine evaluating every customer interaction, uncovering what drives success, and delivering precise, actionable feedback – all without additional effort. This is where AI speech analytics steps in, offering transformative solutions that redefine how QA drives results.
At MaxContact, we’re taking this a step further with Spokn AI Success Intelligence. Designed for revenue-driven teams, this next-generation platform delivers actionable insights to optimise performance, ensure compliance and boost customer experiences.
The challenges with traditional QA in contact centres
Do your current QA methods give you the insights you need to truly drive agent performance?
QA is essential, especially when you consider that 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases from companies offering excellent customer service (HubSpot). However, traditional QA methods often struggle to meet the demands of modern contact centres. Here’s why:
- Resource constraints: Reviewing even a small sample of calls manually is time-intensive and costly. Due to limited resources, many contact centres evaluate only a fraction of their total interactions, leaving critical insights untapped.
- Subjectivity and bias: Human evaluators often bring unconscious biases into assessments, leading to inconsistent results and insights that may not accurately reflect agent performance or customer sentiment.
- Shallow insights: Traditional QA often focuses on generic metrics like call handling time or first call resolution. While useful, these metrics don’t capture the complexities of customer interactions or agent effectiveness.
- Missed opportunities: Manual QA rarely identifies deeper trends, such as recurring objections, common customer frustrations, or effective objection-handling techniques. These insights could shape training, scripting and processes to drive better results.
For sales and collections teams under pressure to deliver more with fewer resources, these limitations highlight the need for a smarter, more scalable approach.
How does AI speech analytics transform QA?
AI-powered speech analytics addresses the challenges of traditional quality assurance by automating call analysis and uncovering insights that traditional methods miss. Tools like Spokn AI transcribe 100% of calls from speech to searchable text files, providing a more comprehensive view of performance.
Key benefits of AI speech analytics
- Comprehensive call coverage: By evaluating every interaction, AI eliminates sampling errors and ensures that no valuable insight is missed.
- Objective assessments: AI removes human bias, delivering consistent evaluations based on data rather than opinion.
- Nuanced insights: Sentiment analysis, phrase identification, and trend tracking aid a deeper understanding of customer-agent interactions.
- Faster feedback loops: With automated insights, managers can provide near-real-time feedback to agents, reducing time between evaluation and improvement.
By automating the labour-intensive aspects of QA, contact centres can focus on driving results instead of sifting through data.
Set clear QA objectives with AI speech analytics
To make the most of AI, it’s essential to align your QA process with clear objectives. Here’s how to get started:
Step 1: Identify QA challenges
Focus on areas where your current QA process is falling short. For example:
- Are call agents struggling to follow scripts?
- Is customer satisfaction lagging?
Understanding these pain points will guide how to strengthen the output of QA processes with AI speech analytics.
Step 2: Define success metrics
Traditional metrics like average call handling time or first call resolution are helpful but don’t tell the whole story. AI speech analytics allows you to measure more nuanced factors, such as:
- Sentiment shifts during calls.
- Frequency and type of customer objections.
- Agent adherence to compliance scripts.
The real power of AI lies in turning data into action. Use insights to refine training programs, improve scripts, and optimise processes, ensuring continuous improvement across the board.
Practical applications of AI speech analytics
Now we’ve defined why using AI speech analytics to aid QA is better than traditional methods, let’s explore how tools like Spokn AI can be used to address specific QA challenges and improve outcomes.
1. Identifying training needs
AI can quickly identify where agents struggle – whether it’s handling objections, following scripts, or navigating sensitive customer issues. With a clearer view of these challenges, managers can:
- Develop targeted training programs that address specific skill gaps.
- Track progress over time to ensure improvements are sustained.
2. Enhancing compliance
Non-compliance can lead to fines and reputational damage. Speech analytics platforms, like Spokn AI, makes compliance checks faster and more reliable by helping QA teams to uncover calls where agents:
- Fail to disclose required information.
- Use unapproved language or phrases.
Without the use of AI speech analytics, this part of the process relies on quality assurance teams listening to calls, which is not only time consuming but focuses on a very small sample of calls.
The capability to search or track text transcripts for specific keywords related to compliance, speeds up the process and makes it much more scalable and robust, protecting your organisation from unnecessary risks.
3. Providing tailored feedback
Generic feedback rarely drives meaningful improvement. AI powered speech analytics software allows managers to deliver precise, data-driven feedback tailored to each agent. For instance:
- Highlight areas of strength, such as effective objection handling or empathy.
- Address weaknesses with actionable suggestions, like improving script adherence.
This targeted approach empowers agents to improve rapidly while creating a culture of continuous learning.
4. Recognising top performers
Spokn AI identifies challenges, yes. But it also highlights what’s working well. By analysing successful calls, contact centres can learn what top-performing agents do differently and replicate their techniques across teams.
Rewarding and recognising these agents boosts morale, also reduces turnover, and sets a standard of excellence for others to follow.
Ready to welcome AI speech analytics? Build your business case.
Can we take quality assurance even further with speech analytics?
Quality assurance is undeniably a crucial part of contact centre operations, with 83% of contact centres recognising it as a critical process, according to our benchmark report. But even with the help of speech analytics, QA is often limited to providing only surface-level insights.
For revenue-driven teams in particular – such as those in sales or collections – standard QA outputs often fall short. These teams need more than just metrics; they need precise, targeted and rapid feedback to drive results.This is where advanced solutions like Spokn AI Success Intelligence come in, elevating QA from a process of evaluation to a driver of performance and improvement.
Introducing Spokn AI Success Intelligence
Designed for revenue-driven teams, our upcoming Spokn AI Success Intelligence feature provides deeper insights into what drives performance, enabling more targeted coaching and process optimisation.
By delivering actionable insights into the “why” behind performance metrics, it empowers teams to go beyond compliance and drive real business growth.
So, what’s the difference?
To understand what Spokn AI Success Intelligence is, you need to know how it moves beyond traditional speech analytics to add a deeper level of insight into sales and collections processes:
Objection handling analysis
Categorises common objections, correlates them with outcomes, and provides actionable insights to refine scripts and coaching strategies.
Call DNA mapping
Identifies the key elements of successful calls—such as sentiment shifts and effective phrasing—allowing teams to replicate these across the organisation.
Enhanced coaching tools
Provides tailored insights that empower managers to deliver precise, impactful feedback, accelerating agent development.
Scalable automation
Analyses 100% of calls without additional effort, freeing QA teams to focus on implementing insights and driving improvements.
Transform QA into a driver of growth
MaxContact has over 20 years of experience in the sales and collections space, working closely with leading AI providers to develop best-in-class solutions.
- Deliver tailored coaching that drives measurable improvement.
- Optimise processes and scripts to maximise performance.
- Enhance customer experiences by addressing systemic issues proactively.
With Spokn AI Success Intelligence, we’re helping contact centres unlock the full potential of their teams and processes.Ready to see it in action? Request a demo today.
