Have You Discovered Why Customers Call? Eureka!

Speech analytics player CallMiner has beefed up its functionality footprint with CallMiner Eureka!, its latest offering. The application, generally available now, automatically analyzes and reports on the content, context, purpose, and outcome of every recorded conversation, enabling companies to understand why customers are calling and how calls are handled, according to the company. "With Eureka! you find what you don't know," says Craig Lakey, CallMiner's vice president of marketing. "Previously you had to predetermine what you thought was relevant. You'd have to think 'I might have this problem, and the best way to determine if I have this problem is to look for these words or phrases.' With [Eureka!] you don't look for anything. It tells you that you have a problem in an area and what's causing it, and that's the true value of speech analytics." The product maps call information into language and acoustic patterns; call patterns are then combined with call data to create call indicators, which are scored, weighted, and indexed, providing a single view of key business indicators, according to the company. Jeff Gallino, CEO of CallMiner, likens the approach to the difference between ticker tapes and the Dow Jones Industrial Average. "Imagine if you could measure 30 or 40 different indicators across every call, things like how much silence is in the call? How polite was the agent? How upset was the customer? That would be a lot of data, and in fact, that would probably be too much data to look at comfortably," Gallino says. "So, we take all of those measures, normalize them on a scale of one to 100, and we build an index kind of like the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Imagine trying to follow the stock market if all you had was a ticker tape--all you could see was this stock went up by two, this stock went down by two; it would overwhelm you. Indexes show you how the whole system is performing." The indexes that CallMiner chose for call centers fall into four categories: customer satisfaction, agent quality, sales performance, and marketing effectiveness. "We take all of those little pieces of data and roll them up to a set of four numbers every day," Gallino says. The release, which includes four modules--Discover, Analyze, Report, and Search--can provide graphic images of data correlation, comparison, trending, and drill down. "You can very quickly see if something changed and from there you can take action," Gallino says. Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting and author of the soon-to-be-released "2007 Speech Analytics Market Report," contends that the approach leveraged by Eureka! is unique, but "it does remain to be seen how well it will be received in the market," she says. "What is the case for sure is that CallMiner has put millions of dollars into its product to improve usability, reduce time to implement the product, and to improve the overall TCO of the product." Overall, though, Fluss adds, "speech analytics is the fastest growing application in contact centers and it appears to be the fastest growing application in the history of contact centers. By taking transactions, structuring them, and finding customer needs, wants, and insights, it is an application that is beneficial not just for the contact center, but for the enterprise." Related articles: QM Saunters to Continued Uptake CallMiner Frees Up Speech The Why Factor in Speech Analytics