QM Is Poised For Growth

Call recording and monitoring for most contact center managers has gone from a way to simply measure how well their agents were following company procedures to being a necessity to determine agent performance and gauge customer satisfaction. According to a report from DMG Consulting, more contact centers are catching on: The firm's "2005 Quality Management/Liability Recording Product and Market Report" says that the quality management and liability recording market will experience solid, double-digit growth in 2005. The report, a guide to the market and its players, contends that the market will experience a 12.5 percent uptake, from $817 million in 2004 to $919 million in 2005, spurred primarily by market innovation and strong solutions. The contact center sector will also experience a surge, according to DMG Consulting, to the tune of 14 percent, from $471 million to $536 million, and the company expects VoIP recording to undergo at least a 100 percent growth spurt in market penetration. "We're in the middle of a better than normal growth rate in the recording segment," says Donna Fluss, principal of DMG Consulting. "People are replacing [the solutions] they had and are finding that if they're doing any form of sales they need to have recording." As quality management vendors expand deeper into the enterprise, the report predicts substantial adoption of speech analytics, performance management, surveying, and coaching offerings. Many of these applications are still for the contact center, Fluss says, but more and more solutions are going beyond the contact center, including speech analytics. "Speech analytics can absolutely help you identify problems quicker, but speech analytics is really more valuable for the rest of the organization than it is for the contact center," she says. "Speech analytics allows you to structure the unstructured. Ninety-five percent to ninety-nine percent of what flows through a contact center is unstructured conversations and transactions, but if you are able to record it and you are able to structure that conversation, you're able to find intense customer needs, wants, and opportunities. As contact centers are increasingly being asked to help organizations generate revenue, that's taking on a whole life of its own." Included in the report's examination of 30 vendors within the market were industry leaders NICE, Verint, and Witness, as well as challengers Dictaphone, Envision, and etalk. Despite Witness' acquisitions of Eyretel and Blue Pumpkin, Verint was the sole vendor in the top tier when rated on product and execution, with both NICE and Witness landing in the second tier. Fluss says that Verint's customers in 2004 were satisfied with the company's offering, but she tells CRM magazine that Verint's small size compared to NICE and Witness poses a challenge. "Witness is the most active of the companies from a marketing perspective and their vision is outstanding, [but] they are still working to build a product that's on one stack technology stack....NICE just restructured their sales organization and they are pretty much geared up to deliver to customers what the customers want and to do that very effectively." Envision and etalk placed into the third tier, with Dictaphone earning a spot in the fourth tier. "If you ask people about recording, guess whose name comes up number one--Dictaphone," she says. "[But] where Dictaphone is most active at this point is in public safety." Envision, also challenged by its small size, Fluss says, captured the attention of the market with its Click2Coach product. "That's why the other vendors came out with coaching modules this year--in response to Envision," she says. After all, "[quality management] products have been wonderfully enhanced in the past three years," Fluss says, "and anyone who hasn't taken a look in the past three years should, because it's very likely that due to the improvements of the solutions they will get a very rapid ROI of less than nine months." Related articles: Witness Systems to Purchase Blue Pumpkin Click! Network Dials Up Better Customer Service Customer Retention: It's All About the Experience