Red Box, a leading voice communications specialist, recently shared the results of a significant global study into general C-Suite executives, IT management employees and CIOs. The study noted that the majority of businesses are only capturing a fraction of their voice data, and don't know how to make the most of this highly valuable information.
76% of the respondents in the study said that they will be implementing a "Voice First" strategy within less than five years. This shows a significant shift in companies understanding the importance of spoken communications. Around 95% of the respondents said that voice was valuable to their organisation.
Despite these results, only 49% of conversations in most organisations are being captured, highlighting the limited recording solutions in many business environments. Additionally, 51% of that data is inaccessible for analytics and AI solutions.
Preparing to Transform the Enterprise
According to the CEO of Red Box, Richard Stevenson, the findings show that voice is a crucial data set for digital transformation in the enterprise and that it holds a great deal of value in terms of context, intent, and sentiment. With voice, it's possible for companies to unlock more profound insights into their customers and therefore drive better business outcomes. However, work needs to be done to help organisations tap into the information they have.
Evolutions in machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions are making voice data more accessible, but only 8% of respondents in the study said that their data is available to fuel analytics and AI. Additionally, while companies see the value of transcription in creating data sets for AI, only 52% are using an automated transcription service.
Most commonly, companies are turning to transcription for accuracy or staff training. On the other hand, the most common uses for AI involve customer experience, predictive analytics, and security or fraud protection. There's a clear need to connect the dots between accurately transcribed data and artificial intelligence solutions.
Balancing Secure and Open Data
Principal of J Arnold & Associates Jon Arnold, said that voice data is currently restricted by a complicated mixture of on-premise and cloud-based telecom systems. Since insights are everywhere within a business, it's crucial for companies to unlock the critical data throughout their organisation and make it accessible to AI.
According to the results of the study, when it comes to looking at security and data accessibility, 85% of businesses believe that complete control and secure access to their voice information is "imperative." Additionally, 84% of respondents said that it's crucial to their voice strategies to take an open API approach that allows them more freedom in how they feed their voice data to the applications of their choosing.
