With the recent launch of CSI’s (News - Alert) Speech Analytics suite, the company surges ahead with new automation features, customization options, phonetics, and more. To better serve the needs of the call center manager, CSI has launched these services after extensive in-person research with its clients. In an interview with Rich Marcia, director of marketing at CSI, I got a better grasp on how exactly the new services optimize the functions of a call center.  See the full exchange below.

TMC (News - Alert): What sort of practical application does your new speech technology have for the call center manager? 

RM: Virtual Observer's Speech Analytics suite, Call Insight, will actually save call center professionals time in their every day tasks. Functions which can be automated with our speech engine include automated call scoring for quality assurance purposes, automated call tagging or marking (for classifying or categorizing a call type), and automated call searching, where they can now find important calls much faster than if they had to play them back and listen. This kind of task optimization will create more time for other important activities, such as creating training programs tailored to the trends which the speech analytics has revealed.

We truly believe our take on the phonetic speech engine will be very well received in most key markets, including the retail/e-commerce, financial and outsourced telemarketing spaces, especially. Call Insight is delivering a powerful toolset which almost any company currently using call recording will find a tremendous value - much more affordable than it used to be, when Speech Analytics was only available from a few high-profile, high-cost vendors.  

TMC: Who is your main customer base?

RM: CSI focuses primarily on the contact centers of the healthcare, financial, retail/e-commerce verticals, but we also do a great deal of call center outsourcers, professional services firms, technology firms, municipal agencies and more. Anyone with a contact center, really. Whereas most of our competition originates from a call logging and liability-driven market, we have always been about the quality assurance and contact center improvement. We've combined the two distinct business models and merged them into a high-value quality optimization solution suite which is both affordable and very scalable. Virtual Observer was designed to be enterprise-ready from the start, with a services-oriented architecture which is now carried over as web services.

TMC: Why do I, as a call center supervisor, need your service offerings?

RM: Call Center supervisors benefit greatly from a solution like Virtual Observer, especially with our VO Live suite of features, which empower the supervisor with a set of agent assistance tools. With VO Live, a supervisor can guide the agent through their processes by interacting via chat, in real time, as they handle a customer call. The supervisor is also able to take complete control of the agent desktop, aiding them in using their applications properly. Supervisors can also save their "favorite" call log views for easy retrieval of important calls based on specific criteria. I think of utmost value is in the automation of the quality process, which is made possible by our Speech Analytics features (for example, automated call scoring and automated call tagging/markup). Our E-learning feature also automatically delivers targeted training material to each agent based on scoring performance at the question level.

Juliana Kenny graduated from the University of Connecticut with a double degree in English and French. After managing a small company for two years, she joined TMC as a Web Editor for TMCnet. Juliana currently focuses on the call center and CRM industries, but she also writes about cloud telephony and network gear including softswitches.

Edited by Juliana Kenny