Nexidia's New ESI 8.0 Ready for the Analytics 'Wave'

By: Brendan B. Read
IVR Community
Jul. 20, 2009

http://ivr.tmcnet.com/topics/ivr-voicexml/articles/60317-nexidias-new-esi-80-ready-the-analytics-wave.htm

Speech analytics is arguably the next big wave in the ability of contact centers to provide high quality/high-efficiency customer care. Like the advent of skills-based ACDs, it mines raw data: in this case the interactions between customers, agents and/or speech rec/IVR systems for information that gives invaluable service and operations insights. The net results are higher productivity and revenues.

With such benefits the demand and use of speech analytics is growing. DMG Consulting forecasts continued market expansion at a rate of 50 percent in 2009 down slightly from 70 percent in 2008, despite challenging economic conditions. And as more firms realize what speech analytics can do more for them the more calls they want to have analyzed.

Nexidia has prepared for this coming wave the Nexidia Enterprise Speech Intelligence (ESI) 8.0. The software enhances first call resolution and expands scalability to drive even greater cost reduction and improved customer satisfaction.

Traditional FCR analysis, says Nexidia, leverages transactional information from the telephony and CRM infrastructure to generate key performance indicator metrics such as average handle time, adherence, customer satisfaction and FCR. Although these approaches can monitor trends in these indicators, they offer extremely limited insight into what is actually driving them. For example, these tools might quickly identify an increase in repeat calls, but provide very limited information into why the increase occurred.

ESI 8.0 integrates traditional contact center data with speech analytics, providing users with a more complete view of FCR performance. By using the transactional data sources to identify repeat callers, Nexidia speech analytics is applied to gain rapid insight into the drivers behind those specific customer calls. The result is that organizations are able to recognize the root cause of repeat calls and pinpoint opportunities for the most effective process improvements.

Some of the key features in Nexidia ESI 8.0 include:

* Enhanced FCR analysis

Tightly integrating with call center data, Nexidia gives the user added flexibility to identify repeat call patterns by call type, drill down to call history, identify top level drivers of repeat callers across massive volumes of calls and review the recorded customer experiences for the entire call series. This enables companies to understand the root cause behind calls and cause/effect relationships so they may take the necessary steps to improve FCR.

* Expanded scalability

Nexidia extends its lead as the speech analytics solution providing the greatest scalability with the lowest total cost of ownership. While a single server can process more than 20,000 hours of audio per day, with ESI 8.0 customers can now integrate multiple servers together to double or even triple this capacity. This increases the value of FCR analysis as it covers an even greater percentage of calls in a contact center.

While this is a lot of potential capacity - the firm says few of its customers tap anywhere near the 20,000 hour mark - the trendline is for more of it being used. Contact centers will draw from it as they seek to improve their FCR rates and drill deeper into other issues such as identifying customers' product concerns and features they'd like to see through analyzing more calls.

* Speaker-separated analysis

New to ESI 8.0 is the ability to analyze calls by individual speaker (agent or customer), providing more relevant results. Additionally, the ESI Forensic Search tools provide easy ways to query, report on and visualize that data; the user can view a speaker-separated player showing tracks, results, cross-talk, and non-talk.

"The first call resolution capabilities in ESI 8.0 allow the user to drill deep and uncover valuable customer insights," says John "J.C." Corrigan, CFP®, president of Customer Analytics Consulting, LLC. "Previously, companies could use traditional methods to understand what was going on in their contact centers, but didn't have enough detailed information to create an effective change. Only Nexidia is combining speech analytics with traditional data from call centers to understand the ‘why' behind the ‘what', providing in-depth knowledge as to why customers are calling back."

The new FCR analysis tools complement the powerful analytics and time to insight already existing in ESI. Organizational dashboards and numerous detailed reports provide a deeper understanding of issues impacting contact center operations. With extensive language support, broad call recording platform integration and flexible deployment options, ESI offers a uniquely scalable solution with the greatest return on investment.

"In a competitive marketplace, determining ways to keep current customers happy while streamlining contact center operations is crucial," says John Willcutts (News - Alert), president and CEO of Nexidia Inc. "Nexidia is determined to offer the deepest, most agile speech analytics technology, and these new FCR analysis capabilities will help companies lower operational costs while increasing customer satisfaction."

The Nexidia solution is also cost effective while enabling customers to obtain a full range of needed capabilities. While other firms are offering stripped-down versions at lower prices aimed at reducing costs, Nexidia instead gives cost-value/conscious customers the option of its on-demand version from which they can then easily migrate to ESI 8.0. Customers can also trial Nexidia's product via its QuickStart hosted service, which is a 90 pilot program that it says will prove the value of our speech analytics solutions using organization's recorded call data.

The applications Nexidia says it provides in its OnDemand hosted services are not ‘lite' offerings but are the full-featured versions that customers can access through simple network interfaces. By avoiding the costs of adding IT infrastructure, software and training, Nexidia OnDemand customers can get immediate benefit of the full features of ESI at both low cost and low risk. Once they have proven the value of speech analytics and the benefits it provides, they have the business case to support ongoing implementations, which can be either continuations of the OnDemand services or licensed installations of the ESI software at their facilities.

"Speech analytics is still on the upward curve of the wave where the technology is ahead of the customers, with features and functionality that many are still learning how to use," explains Jeff Schlueter, VP Marketing and Business Development. "The risk is that if they buy solutions with less features they may find that they will get significantly less value from their investments by not uncovering the root causes behind many of the reasons why people call. And as they understand more what speech analytics can do for them they may then end up playing catchup to obtain critical features, which may be more expensive in the end."