UK-based call center outsourcing firm Ventura is now using Nexidia’s (News - Alert) speech analytics to improve its quality of service.

The company, whose clients include some of the largest global blue chip and UK government organizations, just wrapped up a test pilot where it used Nexidia’s solution to analyze more than 590,000 agent/customer interactions representing more than 50,000 hours of recorded audio. Through detailed analysis of these recordings, Ventura was able to uncover deficiencies in the way its agents handle customers as well as patterns in customer behavior that can be used to drive key business and marketing decisions.

 

Through its use of Nexidia’s Enterprise Speech Intelligence (ESI (News - Alert)) application, version 7.0, Ventura has been able to reduce average call handling time (AHT), drive down repeat callers, identify and remove problem processes, drive additional revenue and build customer satisfaction through value added services.

Ventura was able to test pilot the software through Nexidia’s low-risk Proof of Concept and QuickStart programs, which let companies try out Nexidia’solutions before they invest in any hardware or infrastructure.

“The Proof of Concept and QuickStart Programmes enabled us to concentrate on key areas of the business to gain maximum insight,” said Neil Conway, head of operations, Ventura, in a release. “We have already seen a reduction in our AHT, identified specific training needs for advisors with high handle times, and identified high non-speech areas that are currently being addressed. Additionally, we’ve increased our cross selling of a particular product by over 50 percent in only five months.”

The biggest strength of speech analytics solutions like Nexidia’s is their ability to analyze tens of thousands of hours of recorded call data in just a matter of minutes. For example, if you have three contact centers employing a total of about 1,000 agents, and each of those agents handles about 50 contacts per day, you’d be hard-pressed to go back through all those call recordings manually for the purpose of checking quality and identifying trends.

Today’s speech analytics solutions allow companies to quickly “mine” all of their recorded call data, thus greatly improving their ability to uncover problems in service, as well as trends among customers, and react quickly. What’s more these systems can perform analysis in near real time. And thanks to the power of IP, these systems can analyze call data coming from multiple centers, giving managers a holistic view of all contact center performance.

“With Nexidia’s speech analytics we now have a solution that can tell us exactly what is happening at the point of interaction with the client without having to listen to hundreds of hours of audio,” Conway added. “In fact, we have quantified that it would have taken us 11 man years to analyze the same volume of calls that Nexidia did in the four month pilot.”

Another key advantage of Nexidia’s system is its ability to integrate with just about any call recording environment.

"Being able to extract data from virtually any call recording environment was one of the key factors in our choice of ESI as a speech analytics solution and Nexidia as a partner,” said Richard Mill, managing director, Business Systems (UK) Ltd., a Ventura business partner which provides call recording and systems integration expertise. “As a systems integrator, we strive to provide strong professional services to all our customers no matter what prescriptive solutions are incumbent. With Nexidia we feel confident that they will not only meet Ventura’s multiple client needs, but will become invaluable to us as we strive to provide the highest quality of service and capture greater market share.”

Nexidia ESI 7.0 summarizes and consolidates large volumes of data in a visually intuitive format, giving executives and contact center managers high-level snapshots of call drivers as well as related customer-agent behaviors. They can also drill down for deeper investigation and root cause analysis. The system’s patented phonetic indexing engine lets customers process well over 20,000 hours of audio per day in a single system.

Unlike the speech analytics solutions of a few years ago, which were mainly used to perform simple “word spotting” in recorded conversations, today’s solutions can identify the context of what is being said, giving organizations the ability to more accurately categorize calls and gain new insights into customer and agent behavior. In fact, these systems can now actually detect emotions, giving organizations a powerful new way to gauge calls while they are in progress.

As such, today’s speech analytics solutions have uses beyond just improving agent performance. In fact, it can be argued that they now have greater value outside of the contact center than inside. That’s because today’s solutions are capable of mining all of the call data, as opposed to just a small percentage of it, which enables organizations to get a more accurate view of the “big picture.”

As a result, speech analytics are increasingly being used by executives in sales, marketing and operations to increase revenue, reduce costs, increase customer retention and improve the overall performance of the call center. As organizations come to adopt these solutions, the role of the call center is being redefined into that of a “business intelligence center” — the central hub of intelligence for the organization.