Speech analytics is a vital and long-available tool that helps enterprises understand customers better and improve service, quality, and performance via parsing interactions with live agents and with IVR and speech recognition systems.

 

Yet for too long its adoption rate has been extremely low, reports Jim Shulkin, director of marketing at Envision Telephony, because current offerings are mired in complex and underutilized functionality and require specialized resources to use. That has dragged the solutions’ ROI down, obscuring and limiting its value to companies.

 

In response Envision has devised and released a new, timely, and what it calls “right-sized” speech analytics product, Envision InteractionIQ, which simplifies speech data processing, search, and reporting from within audio recordings. With Envision InteractionIQ, contact center and enterprise management can now affordably and simply incorporate speech data into the workforce optimization analysis equation to more effectively meet agent, center, and business performance objectives.

 

To help get the message out Envision is sponsoring and co-presenting a TMC Webinar at 2 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, June 23, on right-sizing speech analytics tools, led by Frost and Sullivan Principal Analyst and TMC (News - Alert) contributor Keith Dawson.

 

“Envision InteractionIQ breaks down the barriers for contact centers that have not yet been able to take advantage of speech analytics technology,” says Dawson. “Up to now we have not seen widespread adoption of speech analytics even though it can offer tremendously valuable insights to agent, center and organizational performance and trends. InteractionIQ drastically reduces the total cost of ownership for speech analytics while still delivering the market’s core and most practical needs for speech processing technology.”

Envision InteractionIQ, an integrated component of the Envision Centricity WFO platform, contains the core speech processing, capture, reporting and analysis capabilities needed to fully incorporate audio data into WFO analytics. It does so at a fraction of the cost of standard speech solutions that typically price in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

 

The new Envision solution does away with some of what the firm reports are “extravagant and largely underutilized gadget features that have perennially driven up the complexity and total cost of ownership of other speech analytics solutions.” Shulkin points to emotion detection, full-time transcription, and real-time alerts as examples of what he calls “nice to have” features that his firm’s customers have said are not essential and which add significantly: up to 50 percent or more, to the total cost.

 

Emotion detection falls into this category because emotions such as anger do not necessarily translate into lost business, Shulkin points out. Full-time transcription often provides too much data for management to parse through when they need to quickly get important information such as cancellations. While real-time alerts can grab urgent utterances that require responses, with examples including ending service, serious problems with products or threats to agents or firms, the instances where true real-time action is needed are limited.

 

“Implementing most of the currently available speech analytics solutions in the contact center would be like using a sledgehammer to kill a spider,” says Shulkin. “These solutions cost too much because they are weighted down with nice to haves and the path to their eventual ROI let alone immediate ROI is unclear and cumbersome at best.”

 

What’s needed, says Shulkin, is a new and practical approach to making speech analytics a more accessible, mainstream and realistic option for quickly extracting unstructured but meaningful speech data from customer interactions and integrating it with other key customer, call or enterprise data. With this, speech analytics will then become available to even small and mid-sized contact centers, which will help them and their firms to improve their performance. In this fashion it will deliver valuable diagnostic and prescriptive information to decisionmakers in the center and across the organization no matter their size.

 

Envision InteractionIQ does this with features including:

 

With Envision InteractionIQ, customers can easily process, capture, search and analyze audio content from recorded interactions. They can also identify profitable and/or costly products, services and customers and quickly identify and analyze center/business trends based on specified triggers. In addition they can flexibly customize processing settings and capacity to “self-manage” total software and hardware costs. Moreover they can combine speech and other call/business criteria to automatically categorize and sort recordings to streamline evaluations and the entire quality management process.

 

“The primary barriers to speech analytics adoption in contact centers have been consistently cited by our customers and the market for many years,” says Rodney Kuhn, Envision’s CEO. “Those same barriers provided the motivation behind our developing Envision InteractionIQ. We took a fresh approach to develop a new speech analytics solution that is easy to implement, use and cost-justify.”

The TMC webinar attendees will learn about the key barriers to mainstream contact center adoption of speech analytics solutions and about what Envision calls the “new paradigm ‘Blue Sky’ versus ‘Right-Sized’ applications. They will also discover the benefits of right-sized speech analytics solution to the agent, the center, the enterprise and the customer experience. They will also have the opportunity to ask questions about Envision InteractionIQ.

 

“Especially in this economy, organizations must focus on solving immediate business issues, responding quickly to market/competitive trends and continuously improving customer experience,” says Shulkin. “New speech options are opening up to contact centers that enable them to strip out the extravagant and buy only what’s needed to deliver on these and other important objectives.”