In this conversation with Jim Noble, President and CEO of Noble Systems, and Nancy Jamison, Principal Analyst at Frost & Sullivan, we learn about the growing influence of speech analytics. This is the third in this three-part series. In the first part, Jim and Nancy discuss contact centers moving to the cloud, and in the second they consider the value of gamification to contact centers.
NANCY: I’m wondering if you are seeing adoption, because I love speech analytics.
JIM: We are seeing more adoption today, but we’re still not seeing the type of adoption that I might have expected. In the early days of speech analytics, when we first started offering it seven years ago or more, everybody loved it. It was one of those, “Wow, this is the coolest thing!” reactions, but nobody had budget for it.
We could spend three days demoing it and everybody loved it. But, when we asked, “What’s your budget for speech analytics for next year?” we would receive the answer, “We don’t have one.”
So, it’s accelerated slowly and has now gotten to the point where everyone is interested in it. The adoption rate is growing every single quarter. Speech analytics is a verb and not a noun. It’s really something you do; it’s not just a product you buy. Some of the speech analytics products have been a little difficult to use and you needed an army of speech scientists and analysts to really make them work.
So, our new conversation analytics product, Conversations Analytics, is completely integrated into our product, easy to use, and easy to get immediate ROI. We think the adoption is going to be much higher and the satisfaction rate will rise.
NANCY: So we were talking about gamification in our last conversation. I think people now understand what gamification is, it was an RFP check-off item that they didn’t do. Is speech analytics the same way? When you can prove the ROI, show immediate results, and be easy to use, I think your adoption is going to go way up.
JIM: Another huge thing about the speech analytics products is all of the other products that we’ve seen in the past haven’t focused on allowing customers to easily adjust their accuracy rates on the speech analytics to achieve what’s best for them, their businesses, their queries, their acronyms, etc.
One of the things that is built into our speech analytics is when you’re considering it, you’re using plain end-user artificial intelligence. You’re able to adjust the accuracies on it, so you can achieve a high level of accuracy without receiving a bunch of false alerts.
That’s important because people sometimes forget that the very best speech analytics in the world today is still only 80 to 90 percent accurate. Sometimes people have higher expectations than they should for speech analytics. Humans are only 95 percent accurate with speech analytics because of accents and hearing things incorrectly.
NANCY: Thanks Jim, it was great talking with you again and finding out what Noble is doing now and what they are going to be doing in the future and I look forward to talking with you about it again.
JIM: It’s been great talking to you, thanks.
Speech analytics is growing and Noble Conversations Analytics will help you leverage recordings to get actionable business intelligence. With it, you will be able to improve quality assurance and track agent effectiveness.
Nancy Jamison is a Principal Analyst at Frost & Sullivan with more than 30 years of experience, spanning product marketing and management, market analysis and strategic consulting, with a focus on Contact Center and Speech Technologies. In addition, she has 13 years of experience in a major contact center vendor’s product management and marketing department, contact routing infrastructure and applications, IVR/Speech self-service, Speech Technologies, social customer care, and multi-channel and proactive customer care.
Edited by
Erik Linask
