5 Best Conversational Analytics Software for 2023

Customer satisfaction is at the heart of every successful contact centre. According to a recent study, 88% of customers believe that the contact centre experience is as important as the quality of the product itself: providing high-quality support is a vital part of the buying journey.¹

In order to improve customer experiences, many call and contact centres will make efforts to listen to and review their call recordings. However, this is both inefficient and ineffective, and leaves managers individually reviewing thousands of lengthy calls every month. 

Contact centres are increasingly turning towards conversational analytics platforms as a way to quickly and efficiently study customer interactions for actionable insights. These platforms transcribe, process, and visualise data, allowing call centre leaders to quickly review their agents’ performance against KPIs. 

This article discusses the benefits and features of five leading conversation analytics tools and provides some pointers to help contact centre managers make the best choice for their business.

Suggested reading: Read our eBook, ‘How Speech and Voice Analytics can Improve First Call Resolution’, to learn more about the various uses for analytics tools in contact centres.

What is conversation analytics software? 

Conversational analytics software assesses consumer interactions to gather insights into customer behaviour, agent performance, script pathways, agent morale, and much more.  It is often used as a bundled term for call, text and email analytics, and is similar to speech and text analytics software, which interprets and draws insights from written text.

By analysing two-way conversations between the customer and the contact centre agent, conversational analytics offers contextual information that can be used to enhance the customer experience in the long term. 

How does it work?

Conversation analytics software employs machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to intelligently interpret human conversations, including tonal changes, the use of linguistic cues like slang or sarcasm, and insights into the customer’s background and/or demographic.

Once the conversation has been transformed into machine-readable data, AI can identify patterns in the interaction and translate them into actionable insights. Contact centres can batch-upload their call logs by day or week and receive insights on them through one consolidated platform. 

Pro tip: Read our blog, ‘Are Call Centres Ready for Real-Time Speech Analytics?’, to learn more about the use of AI in call centre software.

Why is conversational analytics software important?

Contact centres gather large volumes of consumer data every day — analysing all that data can quickly become overwhelming for a human individual or team.

Conversation analytics software can process interaction data in a fraction of the time and deliver specific, highly relevant insights on how agents can enhance their customer service. Further benefits include:

• Improving efficiency: Conversational analytics software studies case histories and conversational patterns to offer guidance to customer-facing teams. This helps them resolve issues faster, improving customer satisfaction and enabling more calls to be taken per hour and per agent. Moreover, higher efficiency helps reduce overtime hours and manual workloads, thereby improving mental health and reducing stress among call centre employees.
• Providing in-depth insights: Conversation intelligence delivers insights on 100% of the interactions held on any given day or week. Moreover, it offers higher granularity in terms of consumer sentiment and emotional insights that a manual survey might miss.
• Ensuring quality assurance (QA) and compliance: Through the consumer insights obtained, contact centre managers can make necessary adjustments to the way their agents approach and resolve queries. This helps improve service quality standards while removing inefficient processes that increase time to resolution. Managers can also set up specific compliance triggers that can alert them when compliance has been breached.
• Easier agent training and development: Conversation intelligence platforms can analyse agent performance against set benchmarks. Based on these, contact centre managers can identify any skill or training gaps in the team and then address those specifically in their customer service coaching.

Now that we’ve outlined what conversational analytics is and why it’s important, let’s explore some of the best conversational analysis software on the market in 2023. 

1. Qualtrics 

Qualtrics is an omnichannel AI-powered conversation analytics platform that helps contact centre agents respond to customer needs. Call centres can use it to capture customer feedback, view customer sentiment analytics information, and score agent performance against key metrics, thereby closing the loop with customers sooner and reducing the cost-to-serve. 

Key features

• Brings together interactions from 35 digital and social channels across multiple languages
• 100+ pre-built connectors for seamless integration with existing tech
• Automatic coaching opportunity flagging system

2. Speechmatics

Speechmatics is a speech recognition and conversation analytics software that analyses and transcribes customer interactions to identify key trends. Designed to understand customer conversations regardless of dialect or accent, it delivers actionable insights that enable sales teams to meet and serve customers wherever they are.

Moreover, it comes with a wide range of vocabulary customisations for even more relevant insights, especially within industries that use highly technical vocabulary. 

Key features

• Offers high-accuracy transcription across 48 languages as well as English translation for 30+ languages
• Batch transcription that processes an hour of audio in just five minutes, as well as real-time transcriptions of live audio streams 
• Offers cloud, on-prem or hybrid deployment to optimally balance speed with security

3. Talkdesk

Talkdesk is a cloud-based intelligent platform that helps agents connect with customers at any time, through any channel, and on any device. It leverages conversational AI to identify key moments in each interaction and deliver powerful visualisations to help craft a fast, frictionless customer experience. 

It also comes with a ‘clicks not code’ admin structure for ease of use, along with 60+ integrations and 30+ security certifications.

Key features

• CX sensors that send alerts for predefined situations so they can be addressed in real time before being escalated 
• AI-powered voice and text insights for high-quality agent coaching
• Live agent resources such as use case recommendations for real-time performance enhancement

4. Vocalcom 

Vocalcom is a conversation intelligence software equipped with real-time monitoring and decision-making tools. It is designed to help contact centres meet their core KPIs with intuitive, customisable supervision tools that enhance agent performance.

This enables higher productivity across the contact centre as well as faster, more efficient call resolutions.

Key features

• A unified dashboard on which to view a complete record of customer interactions
• Cloud and on-prem deployment options
• Survey sharing to measure customer satisfaction and NPS

5. Awaken

Awaken offers high-level AI conversational analytics software that provides comprehensive insights into what customers are thinking and feeling. Its aim is to help contact centres overcome bottlenecks, drive proactive change and transform from cost centres into value centres.

Despite the growing trend towards self-service and computer-led customer service, 96% of customers state that they would still like the option to speak to a human agent if needed.² Awaken allows call and contact centres to extract valuable insights from their human interactions by automatically transcribing and assessing data from across a range of channels.

Awaken’s interactive dashboards deliver smart, granular insights to help call centre managers get a clear picture of:

• Customer sentiment and satisfaction
• Individual agent performance
• Quality assurance and compliance standards
• Contact centre performance in comparison to core KPIs

With this information in hand, managers have the insights they need to tailor training for each agent so they can deliver exceptional experiences. 

Key features

• Out-of-the-box analytical capacity: Awaken’s post-call analytics offers in-depth insights on variables like conversation topics, customer sentiment, tonal variations, and energy levels.
• High transcription accuracy: Awaken has partnered with a noise cancellation software company to ensure 97% transcription accuracy for calls — an industry-leading figure. 
• Real-time guidance: Awaken’s technology guides agents towards the right information at the right time for improved customer experiences. 
• Low-code system: Awaken is designed for ease of operations; no in-house developer is needed for the customer service team to get started. 
• Flexible pricing structure: Contact centres can start with flexible, rolling monthly pricing plans that they can cancel at any time.

How to choose the right conversation analytics software for your business

It is important to remember that there is no single ‘best’ software: this will depend entirely on your contact centre’s needs and how well a given platform caters to those specific needs. Some key factors to consider when comparing conversational analytics software  are: 

1. Problem-solving capacity. Conversational analytics, first and foremost, should make it easier for your centre to deliver quality customer experience. Whether you’re looking to get granular insights into customer sentiment, collate interaction data across platforms, or handle multilingual customer service conversations, the platform you choose should be equipped for that. 
2. Compatibility with existing hardware and software. Business intelligence platforms must integrate seamlessly with existing tools and hardware. 
3. Pricing model. When trying a platform for the first time, a monthly or rolling payment model is recommended. Contact centres can start reaping the benefits of conversation intelligence without too much of an upfront cost, and should have the option to switch platforms if necessary.
4. Ease of use. Agents should be able to pick up the how-tos of visualising data, pulling up customer histories, creating custom workflows and collaborating on problem resolution without extensive training. Likewise, managers should be able to upload and assess call data without the help of a developer or analyst.

Suggested reading: Explore our case studies to see how different industries can implement and use speech analytics software.

Gain deeper insights with conversation analytics software

Customer expectations are higher than ever, and meeting those standards is essential for maintaining strong client relationships and driving contact centre performance. The right conversation analytics software can significantly improve customer service, providing actionable insights that support managers and their teams.

Awaken offers industry-leading post-call analytics software, real-time guidance, and call centre quality management software, each designed to enhance agent efficiency and boost customer satisfaction. Unlike other analytics technologies, Awaken’s tools are easy to implement and use, and integrate seamlessly even with legacy hardware.

Book a demo today to learn more about Awaken’s capabilities and how it can meet your contact centre’s needs. 

¹  32 Customer Experience Statistics You Need to Know for 2023 

²  Contact Center Statistics: CX in 2023