Get your umbrellas because cloudy days are in the forecast for the call center. I’m amazed at how rapidly adoption of a new technology or paradigm progresses once a certain critical mass is achieved. I’m seeing that happen with the cloud and the call center now. It’s gone past the marketing buzz stage and starting widespread adoption. That’s because it works and it offers benefits beyond traditional, premise-based solution models.
I’ve spent a good deal of my career focusing on speech technology, starting in the early days working on speech-enabling IVR systems. That same basic technology is now opening up a huge, untapped source of business intelligence – call recordings. Our customers tell us thousands of important things every day, but mostly just the agents hear them. And they have way too much other stuff to do to worry about passing any golden nuggets along. With speech analytics every recorded customer conversation can be “listened” to and mined for information.
The majority of speech analytics deployments to date have been premised-based, but there is no compelling technical requirement for that. Indeed, a cloud-based solution has some unique aspects that can increase benefits, and lower costs, compared to premise-based offerings.
A recent report from the research firm Aberdeen Group, Deriving Business Value from Cloud-Based Contact Center Solutions, provides some insights into the benefits of cloud-based solution s in the contact center, including speech analytics. In addition to the usual cost-savings benefits, the report also cites competitive advantages and flexibility as key benefits.
In terms of speech analytics, moving to the cloud brings the ability to conduct analysis on a wider range of customer interactions cross sites, outsourcers and technology vendors. This wider view gives improved and more accurate insights into customer behaviors and drivers. Speech in the cloud enables companies to easily scale processing capacity to meet business needs. It eliminates IT costs associated with maintaining speech servers and provides future-proofing against technology advances.
Speech analytics is an invaluable tool for today’s customer-conscious businesses, and doing it in the cloud makes good business sense.