Verint Systems today unveiled several enhancements to its Real-Time Speech Analytics solution, which combines phonetic speech recognition and full transcription of calls with advanced language understanding.
Verint Real-Time Speech Analytics, which leverages conversational indicators and analyzes customer calls as they unfold, enables organizations to proactively identify opportunities to guide interactions for the benefit of the customer and the company.
The sophisticated rules engine in Verint Real-Time Speech Analytics can identify the presence or absence of words and phrases, as well as the sentiment expressed. With rules functionality that supports a wide variety of word sequences and proximity conditions that can identify situations in which a phrase is said at a certain point in the call or not recited when it should have been, the software can provide contextual help and guidance to agents.
According to Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting, "real-time speech analytics is revolutionary because it has the potential to alter the outcome of a phone conversation while the caller is still on the line."
In its 11th annual "Speech Analytics Product and Market Report," DMG Consulting predicted that the emerging real-time speech analytics segment "will one day be as important as the post-call applications."
Rajeev Venket, senior director of solutions marketing at Verint, calls real-time "the natural evolution" of speech analytics.
"Speech is widely accepted and used today, but customers don't want to wait half a day for the insights," he says. "Companies want to do things in real time."
Verint's Real-Time Speech Analytics is natively embedded in the Verint recorder. Organizations can further the value of Verint Real-Time Speech Analytics by using it as an extension of Verint Speech Analytics and Verint Desktop and Process Analytics.
Customers can take advantage of the advanced capabilities in Verint Speech Analytics by first identifying and understanding patterns of behavior and improvement opportunities, and then leveraging that knowledge to create guidance rules for real-time speech analytics. The addition of Verint Desktop and Process Analytics provides contextual awareness through a combination of desktop activity and transaction-related information to enhance rules.
Real-Time Speech Analytics is part of Verint's broader Customer Engagement Optimization portfolio, which is available for cloud and on-premises deployments.
Though not a new product, Real-Time Speech Analytics is a continuation of advances that Verint has been making across its product portfolio over the past year or so, according to Venket. "This is really the second generation of speech," he says. "It leverages some of the advances we made in the past, particularly around more accurate and faster speech recognition."
This new level of advancement in speech analytics has many advantages, Venket points out. "Speech analytics today can help organizations identify issues and the root causes of those issues. Once they know what the issues are, they can then start fixing them and provide the agents with the guidance they need to do that."
Verint's speech analytics product release comes at a time when DMG Consulting has identified a very robust period of growth for the technology. In its market report, the firm noted that the number of contact center speech analytics seats grew by a very strong 30.1 percent, from 3,507,795 in March 2015 to 4,564,838 in March 2016.
The report maintains that the speech analytics growth rate peaked in 2016, but expects to continue seeing sustained and very positive growth during the next five years. DMG estimates that the contact center speech analytics market will grow by 20 percent in 2016, 18 percent in 2017, 17 percent in 2018, 15 percent in 2019, and 14 percent in 2020.
Speech analytics, DMG concluded, is now a "must-have" strategic solution, enabling companies to mine the wealth of information freely shared with them during customer service conversations to find insights that are useful and actionable.
"When customers share their thoughts, ideas or even complaints with an organization, they are giving them a valuable gift," Fluss said in a statement. "Companies should use speech analytics to leverage phone conversations, converting them into structured data that can be applied throughout the enterprise to improve its performance, products, and bottom line."
Verint is one of the firms listed among the report's leading vendors of speech analytics technologies. Others include Calabrio, CallMiner, inContact, NICE, SESTEK, Voci, and ZOOM International.