Nexidia Launches ESI—Quality Application for Contact Centers

Dec. 15, 2009

New features tie agent performance improvement directly into strategic corporate initiatives

ATLANTA, GA – Dec. 15, 2009 – Nexidia, the market-leading provider of audio search and speech analytics solutions, today introduced Nexidia ESI—Quality, the newest component of the flagship Enterprise Speech Intelligence (ESI) software suite. With ESI—Quality, contact centers can now cost-effectively tap into 100 percent of recorded customer interactions and apply speech analytics to help measure and improve quality and agent performance.  This new capability reinforces Nexidia’s reputation for providing affordable speech analytics across an entire organization; the same approach that has a proven ROI in overall contact center operations can now be applied to analyze activity at the team and agent level.  With this intelligence, contact centers benefit by moving the quality function from an after-the-fact back-office process to a strategic asset for timely decision-making and constructive agent coaching. 

Quality monitoring in most contact centers is a manual process, relying on supervisors to review a small sample of calls for each agent, often as few as five per month.  Such a random sample results in an incomplete view of performance, and does not provide clear signals about what specific customer issues or agent behavior may actually need to be addressed. Some systems, such as those from the legacy call recording vendors, use meta-data and word spotting to bring more calls into the review set. Because of their limited scalability, these methods still rely on filtering the data set down to a smaller number of calls which does not allow for timely analysis across the full activity in the contact center.  As such, these systems do not provide a way to measure agents’ performance across the full breadth of their customer interactions.

ESI—Quality solves this problem by leveraging Nexidia’s patented phonetic indexing and search technology to provide quantitative analysis of large, complete data sets, and coaching and performance management at all levels within a contact center organization.  In addition, building on ESI’s inherent ability to categorize calls and provide important strategic direction to contact center operations, ESI—Quality can analyze agent activity as it relates directly to these same strategic initiatives to ensure that team and agent performance is measured on those activities that are most important to the overall bottom line.

ESI—Quality helps manage multiple teams and centers
Companies that have multiple contact centers, or those that outsource their contact center operations to multiple other agencies, often have difficulty maintaining consistent quality and performance across all these different sites.  ESI—Quality is the perfect solution for this, as it provides a complete analysis of all contact center activity, with reports that show performance on key initiatives between sites, between teams within a site, even between agents on the same team.  The company can tell at a glance how well their overall operations are meeting corporate expectations.

How it works
The process begins by defining Quality Initiatives in the Nexidia system.  These are specific initiatives tied to performance objectives of the company, such as improving first call resolution (FCR) or reducing average handle time (AHT) for a certain category of call.  Measurable performance goals are created to track these Quality Initiatives, with parameters set to show expectations of agent performance.  ESI—Quality then automatically categorizes and measures all calls for each agent, and presents the information in a clear Quality Portal report that shows agent performance against the expectations for each Quality Initiative.

As an example, a Quality Initiative can be established to track how well agents are managing average handle time for billing-related calls.  Within the Quality Portal, supervisors can see at a glance how well their team is doing as a whole, and how well each individual agent is performing on this initiative.  With a single click, the supervisor can bring up every call in the system that relates to that specific initiative for any agent; this is an invaluable tool to support coaching and performance improvement, as it allows supervisors to coach agents based on their total activity for that Quality Initiative rather than on just a small sample of calls.  And additional Quality Initiatives can be set up in a matter of minutes within the system, so as the business environment creates new corporate objectives, these objectives can quickly become an integral part of the performance management of the contact center.

“Nexidia's trademark has been our ability to provide scalable speech analytics solutions that extract relevant, business-oriented intelligence from customer interactions,” said John Willcutts, president and chief executive officer of Nexidia Inc.  “With ESI—Quality, Nexidia is extending this intelligence down to the agent level, enabling contact centers to manage agent performance directly in line with corporate objectives.  This heightens the strategic importance of quality management and its ability to improve the bottom line.”

Availability
ESI—Quality is available immediately, and can be added as an option with any implementation of Nexidia ESI, including on-site deployments or as part of Nexidia’s QuickStart and OnDemand hosted solutions.

About Nexidia
Nexidia is the audio and video search company with patented technologies and breakthrough applications that enable customers to quickly gain new insight, build competitive advantage and realize the amazing possibilities now discoverable in audio and video content from contact centers, media outlets, government intelligence and legal discovery.  For more information, please visit http://www.nexidia.com.  

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Nexidia Contact:    
Renee Maler
Philosophy PR + Marketing
925.968.9495
renee@philosophypr.com