"Analytics" may not be the biggest buzzword in the UC industry, but it's positioned to get bigger. As companies integrate UC applications including contact centers with business systems, they're trying to automate the analysis of exactly what's being communicated across those systems, and feed that information into business apps like CRM.
Enterprises are looking for ways to integrate communications with the analytics that can be applied to social media interactions, and they've also been tantalized by the prospect of speech analytics that would help contact center managers define more precise metrics to help them understand exactly what's being said to and by agents. Especially important is to be able to do these analytics in real-time, while the customer interaction is still going on.
Real-time speech analytics are a key element of Interactive Intelligence's latest release of its flagship IP communications/contact center platform, Customer Interaction Center 4.0. The official announcement was today, but Interactive previewed the 4.0 release at its recent customer event a couple weeks back in their hometown of Indianapolis.
The real-time speech analytics module generated a lot of buzz among customers I talked to at the event, and it was also the first thing that Interactive's marketing VP, Joe Staples, wanted to talk about in our briefing on the CIC 4.0 release. He said the speech analytics module will go for $3,750 for the server software plus $295 per agent enabled with the technology--but even this additional cost is about an order of magnitude lower than speech analytics costs if it's procured and implemented as a standalone system from other vendors, Joe claimed.
"It's been touted for a number of years," Staples said of speech analytics, "but it's never hit the mainstream because of expense and complexity."
Among other things, the analytics engine can distinguish when the agent is talking versus the customer--as Joe Staples quipped, "It's bad if your customer is swearing at the agent. It's really bad if your agent is swearing at the customer." You can define the keywords you want to capture through the analytics engine, and define separate sets of keywords aimed at first-call resolution, churn reduction, positive agent behavior, negative agent behavior, and unhappy customers.
Another improvement in the 4.0 release is architectural; with this version, CIC becomes a pure application server, and all media processing and serving is moved off to separate servers. This improves scalability and reliability, and allows enterprises to centralize the CIC software while distributing the media servers. That configuration also lets the enterprise keep local sites running on the media servers' limited software control should the main site or the WAN connectivity go down--it's the same principle as the survivable media gateway for centralized IP-PBXs.
The 4.0 software can also be fully virtualized, which further strengthens the datacenter or "private cloud" story for CIC.
Another major advancement, from the enterprise perspective, is a change in the CIC licensing model with 4.0, from named user to concurrent licensing. Now, a contact center with multiple shifts only needs to buy as many licenses as they'll need at peak, rather than having to purchase as many licenses as they have total agents employed--saving a lot of money, potentially.
Analytics is the biggest leap forward in this announcement, and it's an area where enterprises seem to be just starting to explore the possibilities. Assuming prices keep falling and the technology keeps improving, it could be the next hot topic in Indianapolis a year from now.
