Speech Analytics: The Time for ‘Listening’ to the Voice of the Customer Is Upon Us

K. Landoline

Summary Bullets:

• Hundreds of millions of minutes of customer care conversations are recorded annually in contact centers, but less than 0.1% of recorded conversations are ever replayed and analyzed.
• Automated speech analytics, which can mine most of these conversations for useful information, is finally getting the attention of customer care executives as the technology improves and the ROI is validated.

I have been following the speech analytics market as it pertains to customer care and contact centers for the better part of a decade.  The application has only come into its own as it gained credibility through successes in the past two or three years.  Recently, there has been an uptick in sales at companies that provide the technology to monitor the ‘voice of the customer,’ such as CallMiner, Nexidia, NICE, Utopy and Verint.  There has also been a flurry of merger and acquisition activity among companies that provide contact center solutions and those that deliver customer feedback applications.  Verint acquired Vovici, a provider of feedback management solutions; Avaya purchased Aurix, a speech analytics company based in the UK; and Hewlett-Packard bought analytics platform provider Vertica.  I believe the industry is now leaving the embryonic stage and moving into a more mature phase of growth that will continue for the next decade.