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The insurance industry has not gotten easier lately. Costs are rising, competition is increasing, margins are flattening, and consumer expectations are not.

A tried and true method for driving additional performance in challenging industries is leveraging new technology. For the insurance industry, speech analytics is just such a technology.

There are four ways that speech analytics can benefit an insurance company: It can help deliver better customer service, expand cross-selling opportunities, drive operational efficiencies and assist with regulatory compliance.

What speech analytics does, at root, is give management eyes and ears on every call made by every agent. Technology such as CallCopy’s (News - Alert) call recording and desktop screen capture software makes it easy to record every customer interaction, and then speech analytics enters the picture by taking these recordings and making sense of them.

While management can’t listen in on every call or review every recording, speech analytics can automatically sift through call recordings and pull out important sections of calls for review and training. This has wide applicability for the insurance industry.

In particular, speech analytics make it easier for insurance agencies to increase first call resolution rates and ensure procedural adherence by improving agent training and coaching. With analytics, management can quickly find troubling or exceptional customer interactions and use them for education purposes. It is one thing to talk about a call scenario and another to hear one actually unfold.

This can be a big driver of new business, as a J.D. Power and Associates 2008 Insurance New Buyer Study revealed that 14 percent of customers started looking at other insurance agencies because of poor customer service, and 73 percent of these searches resulted in a change in insurer. Customer service matters.

A second way that speech analytics can assist insurers is through cross-selling opportunities. While margins have decreased on traditional insurance offerings in many cases, deregulation has enabled firms to now sell additional services such as estate planning, retirement planning and other financial services. With call recording and speech analytics, cross-selling can be improved by better training staff using real-world call examples culled from the call recordings with speech analytics. Coaches also can monitor agents better and highlight when they are not cross-selling effectively.

Operational efficiencies are a third way that speech analytics can be useful. Efficiency can drive down costs, and speech analytics can make insurers more efficient by identifying workflow issues and interface design flaws through agent screen capture data, reducing average handling time through agent training and coaching, and optimizing employee performance by delivering actionable data to the right people at the right time.

Finally, a fourth use for speech analytics in the insurance industry is better regulatory compliance. Through products such as CallCopy’s PCI compliance solution, insurers can monitor agent regulatory compliance and quickly nip in the bud any violations. In cases where compliance accusations are made, insurers also can arm themselves with proof of compliance via the recordings they keep and are able to search through easily using speech analytics.

So while the insurance industry has not gotten any easier, new technology might make it seem that way.

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