In a triple announcement this week, Interactive Intelligence scored a hit on three fronts, adding survey functionality and speech analytics to the contact center, and integration with Microsoft OCS. Today, I'm going to focus on the first two as they are what had me nodding in agreement when I was briefed on them. They also, unlike the OCS integration, fall under the umbrella of what Interactive Intelligence is calling Customer Feedback Management.

In a triple announcement this week, Interactive Intelligence scored a hit on three fronts, adding survey functionality and speech analytics to the contact center, and integration with Microsoft OCS. Today, I'm going to focus on the first two as they are what had me nodding in agreement when I was briefed on them. They also, unlike the OCS integration, fall under the umbrella of what Interactive Intelligence is calling Customer Feedback Management.Customer Feedback Management in essence captures the voice of the customer to give actionable feedback, going beyond the normal resources provided by contact center statistics, recording and quality monitoring resources. The first of the two products is Interaction Feedback: an automated post-call survey application provided as a software add-on module to the company's all-in-one IP communications software suite.

I've seen a few other vendors that have integrated post-call survey applications, such as Syntellect's Survey Manager, but these applications aren't as widespread in the market as you might think. That is surprising, in that being able to survey customers immediately after the call provides the most accurate and fresh feedback, in the most cost-effective manner. Contacting customers after the fact by e-mail or phone not only costs more, but lessens the chance that they will say yes to the survey or remember everything about the call.

What caught my eye about Interaction Feedback was not just the ability to capture survey information from callers, and to provide feedback and alerts to supervisors, but its ability to compare that data with other similar data. Interaction Feedback is integrated with call recording and scoring features, giving supervisors greater visibility into what is happening with customers. Further, through a relationship with CFI Group, feedback can be benchmarked against similar questions posed in similar surveys in specific industries. Supervisors using Interaction Feedback get a 360-degree view of the customer call based on an association between call recording, scoring and specific survey results.

A few other nuggets about the product were the wizard interface used for set-up, which requires no programming, and the fact that the survey can be offered up-front to callers without agent knowledge, for completion as soon as the agent disconnects. This essentially removes any agent bias from the equation. It is configurable to survey according to rules, such as only surveying calls that come in on certain lines, or specific customer groups, and it can be set to record specific calls also.

The second part of the Customer Feedback Management announcement was on speech analytics, which will also be offered as an add-on module. This is one of my personal favorites. Interactive Intelligence is growing its own real-time speech analytics that will provide emotion detection, reporting and alerts. Based on a range of emotions, this application provides real-time feedback to supervisors, and alerts can be set based on triggers of specific emotions, such as anger, excitement, etc.

Interaction Feedback is due out in Q3 2008 and the speech analytics module, still under development, will follow as part of the company's Customer Feedback Management roadmap.