The business of analyzing voices and language is booming, which puts speech analytics leader CallMiner (News - Alert) in a very good position as the New Year looms. But it didn’t just “happen”; the company made some strategic moves to get where it is today, and sees more of the same coming for 2014. We recently had a chance to touch base with Terry Leahy, president and CEO of CallMiner, for a look back and a look ahead at what he believes the next year will bring:
TMCnet.com: What was the high point of this past year for your company?
Terry Leahy: First up, the continued expansion of our user groups and customer conference. We had twice as many attendees as last year, and hope to double attendance again next year. We’re proud that our customers are so eager and willing to share their speech analytics success stories with us and with each other.
TMC (News - Alert): How did 2013’s market changes affect your business, if at all?
TL: We are seeing the market finally accept speech analytics as more of a “must have” in the call center and less of a luxury item, largely being driven by compliance requirements and changing regulations for contact centers. More and more companies are realizing that in order to truly improve compliance, contact center efficiency and measure agent performance, you need to analyze 100 percent of customer contacts, not just a small sample.
TMC: What are you looking forward to most in the New Year?
TL: The continued growth of our company. We are excited about where the industry is headed and feel like our continued hard work has positioned us as a leader in the speech analytics space.
TMC: Where do you see your industry headed? More specifically, what challenges do you anticipate?
TL: There has definitely been a push toward real-time monitoring and speech analytics. Post-call analytics will always have excellent value in terms of performance evaluation and trending analytics in aggregate, but there is definitely a growing demand for real-time feedback that can be delivered to agents and supervisors while calls are still ongoing. The challenge with real-time is whether organizations will be able to effectively “operationalize” the inclusion of real-time feedback into their workflows.
TMC: What innovations or changes do you have on the horizon?
TL: We want to continue simplifying the process of extracting actionable information from contact center conversations. Today’s users are expecting clean and simple GUIs that are easy to work with, and it’s our job to make sure we keep delivering powerful and easy to use analytical tools. In addition, the feedback we’ve gotten on our real-time products has been great, and we plan to expand on its capabilities.
Edited by Alisen Downey