A few weeks back I highlighted several fascinating days I spent with contact center solutions leader Interactive Intelligence ("Interactive") at their annual partner event. I said there would be details to follow on what I saw, heard, got a chance to kick the tires of as well as the feedback received from various partners. With the formal release of CIC 4.0 for its flagship Customer Interaction Center (CIC) all-in-one IP communications software suite in late November, now is a good time to focus in on what’s new and why the excitement.
I will start with Interaction Analyzer which as previously mentioned got my juices flowing. This real-time speech analytics capability is now part of CIC and will be available in two versions: a basic one now available with CIC 4.0 with updates soon to follow, and a forthcoming advanced version.
Challenges and importance of SPEECH —visualization, recording, monitoring and analytics
Rightfully, contact center concentration today is on improving the “Customer Experience.” In fact, the laser-like focus on this by Interactive that allowed it to have a banner year in the market and in terms of industry recognition. However, it is important to understand that when looking at customer experience holistically there are three constituencies that must be served to facilitate compelling experiences and superior outcomes — agents, supervisors and customers.
Agents: Need access to the right tools, at the right time and the proper training and supervision to perform at optimal levels.
Supervisors: Require dashboards to not just monitor agent performance but to be able to spot problems with customers as quickly as possible and react appropriately, understand trends, and plan for the proper allocation of resources to continuously improve performance.
Customers: Demand that their interactions be taken and resolved quickly.
It is a virtuous circle. When the right people with the right information and tools can be responsive to customers efficiently and effectively, supervisors can focus on resolving major issues without wasting time on outlier ones, and can use the metrics they have to not only fix significant problems in near or in real time but make the entire contact center experience continuously smarter. This includes being able to pass along critical information to sales and product management.
Employment of visualized speech with accompanying analytics improves the ability of all three constituencies to have satisfactory sessions on a consistent basis. That said, leveraging the value of speech analytics has been a journey. Forrester Research, in fact, has pointed to cost, unclear business value, ROI too distant or uncertain and complexity of deployment as market inhibitors.
As Matt Taylor, director of product management who is responsible Interaction Analyzer, recently told me, Interaction Analyzer overcomes all of these challenges because it:
The first point is key in terms of what has held back the deployment of speech-based tools in the past. The technology was not ready, especially for independent speech recognition that could adequately capture information and early attempts to analyze emotive qualities proved problematic and inaccurate. This meant using speech, if used for mostly historical purposes and the cost was prohibitive for all but the most sophisticated customers.
He stated that, “It makes our customer’s jobs easier. Supervisors can quickly pick what to listen to, do their jobs better in real time, and through spot trends that will enable them to be more effective on a variety of fronts long-term.” He added that, “The ability to pass along critical information to product marketing, field support, sales and upper management should not be under-estimated.” He also noted that improves agent performance and hence the experience of Interactive customers’ customers.
The good news is that for Interactive CIC users they already are using supervision and quality management interface on their systems so adding Interaction Analyzer is inexpensive, especially given the value-added.
Enter Interaction Analyzer
So what does Interaction Analyzer deliver? Simply put, a cost-effective and powerful way to answer past challenges. Based on real-time keyword/phrase spotting, Taylor articulated in an Interactive guest blog posting by analyst Nancy Jamison the “must haves” for any effective implementation of speech visualization and analytics:
Interaction Analyzer has all of this an more, but how does it work?
Taylor told ContactCenterSolutions that the days when merely recognizing a spoken word or phrase by an agent during a conversation which gave way to listening to recorded conversations to spot trends was not only costly but time-consuming, and led to the skepticism reflected by Forrester. Plus, while monitoring, recording and post-session surveys are all very important parts of delivering a great customer experience, other than the later they do not include the value of scoring which is the key to being fast to react and invaluable for being proactive based not only on visualization but on alerting as well. Interactive provides a great explanation of this on their website:
During a live call, as Interaction Analyzer spots keywords and phrases, it is continually updating a set of scores for each interaction. Both the agent and customer have a cumulative score assigned to them that can be seen in Interaction Supervisor®. This score is calculated based on the keywords and phrases the agent and customer each have spoken, and on the scores (positive or negative) that were assigned to them when the keyword lists were created. Supervisors can then make better informed decisions on which calls might need assistance by using the Analyzer scores with all the other data that’s available about the interaction.
The saying that, “a picture is worth a thousand words” applies here. Below is a snapshot of what visualization of speech using keyword spotting looks like.
Source (News - Alert): ©Interactive Intelligence 2011
Think about the time saved and the knowledge gained from this type of dashboard in real time, never mind its historical analytic value for things like training and resource planning.
Partners are excited
I probably spoke with over a dozen Interactive partners at the event. While a bit anecdotal, there was unanimous consent that Interaction Analyzer was going to emerge as a “must have.”
The good news for Interactive is that each partner had a slightly different spin on the value added, and why they were excited about introducing the capability to their current and potential customers. “It will help my customers have the right agents properly assigned to daily hot spots,” one said. Another cited “the value of the keywords in knowing very quickly where product flaws are causing problems or business processes and practices need to be fixed that could be passed along.” Another spoke about the ability of gaining competitive intelligence. And, all agreed that Interaction Analyzer not only would vastly improve contact center supervisors ability to put agents in the best position to resolve customer issues, but would also save supervisor time so they could concentrate on major issues.
Transforming contact centers through speech
The old axiom “Time is Money” has been the driver behind contact center innovation since call centers become critical parts of enterprise operations. The goal has always been to handle as many calls as possible as fast as possible as inexpensively as possible, and to keep improving agent skills and tools to keep the percentage of resolved interactions high and hopefully keep agent turnover low. However, this was being mostly reactive, and learning came from going back and listening to what happened both when things went bad and adopting the best practices of when things went well.
Reality is we live in a world that is moving at Internet speed where competitors are a click away, customers are becoming more and more disloyal, and the math says a dissatisfied customer who was expensive to obtain is not likely to return if they are not satisfied. Contact centers to provide superior customer experiences and increase customer satisfaction need the ability to move as fast as the business world is moving. Speech visualization and analytics through Interaction Analyzer gives contact centers the capabilities they need to be efficient, effective, proactive as well as reactive, and poised as a value generator instead of the historic view of them as a necessary cost center. Now that is real transformation.