September 15, 2006
By Coreen Bailor, (former) Associate Editor, CRM Magazine

Product Spotlight: ACCE 2006

Contact center vendors used ACCE (Annual Call Center Exhibition) 2006, held at the Washington State Convention & Trade Center this week in Seattle, to unveil new products and partnerships. Highlights included:

Envision Telephony has announced the availability of its Identity Protection solution, aimed at helping contact centers protect sensitive customer data like date of birth, social security numbers, drivers' license numbers, and credit card numbers, captured from customer-agent interactions. "The problem that a lot of our customers are running into is, there is a lot of private information" revealed during calls, and as more enterprises listen to the voices of their customers outside of the contact center the need for greater protection increases, says Rodney Kuhn, CEO of Envision. The solution "reduces the chance for fraud" and protects brand trust.

Etalk, a division of Autonomy, has made available Qfiniti Assist, a desktop tool that leverages speech recognition functionality to analyze customer interactions and then locate the needed information. Qfiniti Assist, says Roger Woolley, senior vice president of marketing and CMO, extends beyond basic word-spotting and provides more contextual analysis. "The idea is that while agents are on the line with a customer the system has the ability to listen to the customer's question and retrieve the relevant information from various sources to provide accurate, timely answers for customers on the line," Woolley says. The offering, available as a module within Qfiniti Enterprise, allows for text or audio queries. It features natural language search capabilities delivered through a floating toolbar and returns current and appropriate documents, while related documents are retrieved using a hyperlinking feature so agents are prepared to answer additional questions on the same subject, according to the company.

HigherGround has released version 7.6 of its Fusion Series 7 software, an upgrade that is free to subscribers of HigherGround's maintenance service. The latest installment delivers new capabilities including virtual channel trunk recording functionality allowing each segment of a call to be archived, retrieved, and played back based on identifiers like calling number or case number, according to the company. Additional capabilities include docking the playback window in the Report Commander Pro module for enhanced reporting and a simplified sign-in process through a domain authentication module.

Nortel has unveiled the Nortel Contact Recording and Nortel Quality Monitoring suite, developed with Witness Systems. The suite can capture customer interactions in IP and traditional TDM environments. It is controlled and administered through one user interface across an enterprise and can be deployed independently or with the Nortel Contact Center solution. The suite "allows customers to record not just the agent and customer conversation, but all of the screen activity that occurs at the agent's [desktop]," says Paul Lutz, Nortel's director of product marketing for multimedia applications. Nortel customers including Communication Services for the Deaf, Lansforsakringer AB, and Northern Tool + Equipment are using the suite.

Verint Systems has introduced Customer Interaction Analytics (CI Analytics), its new analytics offering that combines speech analytics technology with Verint's Interaction Intelligence methodology, which will be delivered as a managed service through a network of certified consulting partners. The offering is platform agnostic, meaning it operates independently of call recording infrastructure that may already be deployed. According to Verint, it is best suited for large enterprises with high volumes of customer interactions. Verint, which is also leveraging consulting expertise from its acquisitions of CM Insight and Opus Group, is providing prepackaged solutions for business problems like first call resolution. The combination of technology and methodology will help companies pinpoint their most important interactions and analyze their true impact on customer relationships, according to the company. The real value of information captured by the contact center and analyzed using speech analytics technology "is what it unearths about the rest of the business," says Mariann McDonagh, vice president of global marketing.

Related articles:

The Why Factor in Speech Analytics

E-Learning for the Enterprise

QM Is Poised For Growth