Known for its ability to provide data delivery in new and innovative ways, Acme Packet’s sessions were very popular at the conference.  Acme Packet is the leader in session border control (SBC) solutions, delivering high-quality interactive voice, video and multimedia communications across IP network borders.  What’s interesting, though, is the way they’re changing the market.

Connected Planet agrees:

“The cost-savings appeal of SIP trunking, and Acme’s ability to turn its product sales, is a great example of straight-forward vendor blocking and tackling. Good for Acme to recognize the opportunity and pursue it aggressively. What’s more interesting, especially for service providers, is the “Swiss Army knife” or “Tower of Babel” role Acme (and other SBC vendors) have come to play sitting in the middle of emerging IP networks.”

– Rich Karpinski, Connected Planet

Acme Packet has designed their SBCs to include some very well-thought-out features. We’re currently working on integration and interoperability testing to record SIP traffic directly from these SBC units. This will allow organizations to continue to leverage our  suite of applications as they convert their telephony networks to SIP.  ACME’s flexible approach will make SIP-enabled call recording scalable and very easy to deploy alongside the CallCopy solution.

Many organizations understand that there is value in implementing a speech analytics solution, but struggle with defining best practices and objectives associated with an effective program.

Speech Analytics Best Practices:

1. Identify key words and phrases that matter.
   Your organization is unique.  Make sure you define the key words and phrases that make the most sense for your organization and align with your business goals.  Remember to include names of competitors, phrases indicative of decreased customer satisfaction (such as “I want to cancel,” “speak to your supervisor” or “frustrated”) and other service-level KPIs.  If needed, fine-tune the software to recognize non-standard words such as jargon, slang and foreign words.  Also, be sure to include other departments in the process, as they will be able to provide additional insight into the words and phrases important to other areas of the organization.
2. Share the knowledge.
   One of the benefits of speech analytics is that it allows you to extend the business intelligence gathered within your contact center throughout the entire organization.  In effect, this means tearing down the virtual wall between the call center and other areas of the organization, and allowing the knowledge gained during customer contacts to be shared cross-departmentally (think sales, marketing, collections, fraud and other departments).  Historically, this information may have been lost or communicated less effectively as agents are pressured to move on to the next call in queue.
3. Coach and train your agents.
   Use the key word/phrase mining and silence detection capabilities in your speech analytics software to improve processes and identify agent coaching or up-training opportunities by understanding trends and underlying issues. For example, extended pauses by the agent could indicate a need for additional product training.
4. Mine all of your calls, not just some of them.
   By mining 100 percent of your calls, you will be able to pinpoint the occurrence of those critical key words and phrases to give you a better (and more accurate) frame of reference while enabling a full view of corporate insight. This is particularly important when monitoring for uncommon, yet critically important phrases that may be missed when only a subset of calls is mined.
5. Listen to your customers.
   Your customers give you information with every call.  An effective speech analytics solution allows your organization to zero in on the critical pieces of information, and extract meaningful data without wasting time or resources on the less significant segments.  Analyzing and understanding this data allows you to makes actionable business decisions based on the wants and needs of your customer base.

Ultimately, speech analytics best practices can help your organization improve customer satisfaction through agent coaching and up-training opportunities, improved process adherence, trend and key word /phrase identification and extendible business information.  Applying speech analytics best practices to your organization will allow you to better understand your customers by providing you with valuable insight, and the tools needed to turn that insight into critical business intelligence.

» Learn more about CallCopy’s speech analytics solution.

“[Speech analytics] gives us information that we had no other way of getting,” she says. “The only other way we had of getting it was to have our agents write up these conversations or have phone recordings transcribed. And that was prohibitively expensive….”

“Our customers tell us what they want and it falls onto the deaf ears of agents who are being rushed to move on to the next call. Speech analytics doesn’t get rushed.”

These comments speak to the value that speech analytics solutions offer. Phonetics-based speech engines can constantly extract data from  all contact recordings, searching for valuable nuggets of information that provide powerful data for many business units in an organization, not just the contact center. Rather than relying on front-line agents reporting information ad hoc, or asking supervisors and quality management staff to report and analyze intelligence gathered from reviewed calls, speech analytics allows for constant querying of critical business data.

• DMG has published a detailed report examining the market:
  2009-2010 Speech Analytics Market Report and Consulting Services
• Visit CallCopy’s Speech Analytics Page for more information