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Nexidia combines realtime speech analytics with knowledge management

Aphrodite Brinsmead

Nexidia combines realtime speech analytics with knowledge management

Nexidia has announced that it will offer realtime speech analytics through its Enterprise Speech Intelligence (ESI) software suite. Its ESI-Monitor solution will integrate Nexidia's realtime speech analytics with existing applications. Alongside this, Nexidia is introducing Agent Assist, a solution that pulls information from the knowledge base using realtime speech analytics to suggest relevant information for agents to provide to customers. This move reflects Nexidia's strong position and its ability to drive innovation in the market. Integration with knowledge management differentiates Nexidia and provides agents with instant access to information.

Nexidia is driving innovation in the speech analytics market

Nexidia has been instrumental in driving the speech analytics market forward: its on-demand Quickstart program allows enterprises to conduct a 90-day pilot, focusing on business objectives and addressing capex issues. The introduction of Monitor and Agent Assist will reduce average handle times and improve first-call resolution by helping agents find information quickly.

Nexidia's development is interesting from two angles. The first is the use of realtime speech analytics to assist agents directly. Speech analytics is typically used after customer interactions have taken place to assist contact center managers with monitoring calls and finding issues to resolve. The second point of interest is the integration with external software solutions such as knowledge management (KM). Workforce optimization technologies (WOTs) must integrate with contact center infrastructure and agent desktop applications to enable more efficient operations. Contact centers need to link applications to optimize business processes and assist agents with navigating numerous screens. At the same time, data should integrate into one analytics solution to help managers find trends.

Knowledge management is becoming an important contact center tool

The integration of KM with CRM and speech analytics improves efficiency. Agents often need to switch between applications on the desktop to find relevant information, which can be frustrating for customers as handle times may increase. When knowledge base search is automated, relevant content is pushed straight to agents and they can provide customers with information faster. This is also beneficial for contact center managers as agent training and average handle times can be reduced, helping make agents more efficient and increasing cost savings.

Although the continued automation of answers and the introduction of realtime feeds for agents potentially reduces hold times and increases customer satisfaction, there are also disadvantages. As with any automated solution, agents have less room for intuition and the experience becomes less personal. As web self-service continues to increase in popularity, customers will call the contact center with more complex or unique requests; automated responses and scripted prompts are less likely to deliver the correct results. Contact centers need to take this into consideration when deploying any integrated KM solution.

2009 has been a significant year for developments in speech analytics, and we expect additional announcements and integrations

Speech analytics vendors are aggressively targeting contact centers with packaged solutions, on-demand services and scaled-down versions to attract mid-market customers. Notable announcements in the speech analytics market in 2009 include Envision releasing its new scaled-down speech analytics solution InteractionIQ, and Verint offering a version of its Impact 360 Speech Analytics entitled Essentials to target mid-market contact centers. Enterprises have traditionally found it difficult to justify the cost of deploying speech analytics, and instead focused on deploying core WOTs such as logging, QM and WFM. These recent market developments have helped to change the negative perceptions about the expense of speech analytics, as well as directly addressing contact center pain points.

Nexidia's suite solution competitors have an advantage in that they are able to upsell speech analytics to their large customer base of call recording and QM users. In order to compete as a standalone, 'best-of-breed' vendor it is necessary to provide differentiating features, and this is what Nexidia is doing. However, the market is developing rapidly and Nexidia's competitors are likely to follow close behind in adding realtime speech solutions and integrations with CRM and KM vendors. Further integrations with CRM and KM providers are likely to occur in the near term by WOTs vendors as contact center applications are drawn together through unified agent desktops and the need for cross-channel consistency.

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