Mindshare Technologies released an industry-changing product today: Mindshare Speech-to-Text™, taking the next step into the future of Customer Feedback Management and the Voice of the Customer (VoC).

Despite its simple name, Mindshare Speech-to-Text goes way beyond automated transcription. Once an audio comment is transcribed, Speech-to-Text feeds it through Mindshare’s robust Text Analytics Suite™, instantly converting the audible feedback into actionable information for store managers and company execs.

“Mindshare Speech-to-Text is like Voice Analytics on steroids. Typical Voice Analytics tools simply recognize specific keywords spoken in an audio customer comment. They report keyword frequency, which tells store managers very little. Those systems are slow, expensive, and force store managers to spend tons of time listening to and analyzing comments,” said Kurt Williams, Mindshare’s CTO. “Mindshare Speech-to-Text is the opposite – it inexpensively makes the audible actionable for location managers. And it works faster than any Voice Analytics or transcription service on the market.”

Customers love to provide feedback openly to an automated phone survey. They can rant and rave to their hearts’ content without uncomfortable or limiting conversation from the other end of the line. But unfortunately, open-ended comments are the most difficult for businesses to understand and analyze. Mindshare Speech-to-Text eliminates that problem, empowering companies with the ability to capture and use their customers’ full experiences.

With Speech-to-Text, individual location managers and company execs receive their customers’ comments in both audio and transcribed formats in real-time. But the value of Speech-to-Text is magnified in the insights it provides through Mindshare’s 3-product Text Analytics Suite:

• Mindshare Explore™: Explores every sentence of each customer comment to identify the phrases and topics most often mentioned, like "wait time," "rude employees," and "cell phone.”
• Mindshare Discover™: Discovers previously unknown insights in multiple customer comments by correlating structured data (like location, time of visit, and customer satisfaction ratings) and unstructured data (open-ended comments). For example, Discover can find that employee cell phone usage drives poor customer satisfaction ratings.
• Mindshare Monitor™: Monitors trends in customer comments based on categories specific to your business. For example: if a customer says they "waited 20 minutes," Monitor categorizes it as "Speed of Service," then adds it to a trend report and graph.

“It’s wise for companies to leverage the new age of the customer: armed with cell phones and ready to critique,” said Richard Hanks, author of the book Delivering and Measuring Customer Service. “By making customers’ spoken comments more accessible, understandable, and actionable, companies in any B2C industry can finally use their customer feedback to its full potential. And they can do it in real-time!”

Mindshare Speech-to-Text is being rolled out to Mindshare’s client base, including retailers, restaurants and contact centers.