The Hindu Business Line : NICE tool for contact centres — Voice analysis to capture shades of emotions

It has come armed with the solutions it has developed for recording and analysing every word, emotion and exchange in contact centre multimedia interactions. These mountains of information are then be digitised, and extracted in any permutation and combination that a BPO or a bank would require.

Was a call transferred ten times? Were four-letter words used? How many customers were angry? Was the tone of an employee off-putting?

Mr Haim Shani, CEO of Ra'anana-based, Nasdaq-listed NICE Systems, says that these solutions aid in customer training, customer surveys, dispute resolution and employee retention.

Already, NICE, which has tied up with Avaya Global Connect, has Indian BPO customers such as Sutherland and Wipro Spectramind. It recently enlisted the Chennai-based Allsec Technologies as a customer. NICE has done 140 installations for 100 clients in India, in tie-up with Avaya.

Although there are companies that do record interactions, Mr Shani said that his company's specialisation is in storing and analysing unstructured data in a variety of combinations.

Unstructured data, Mr Shani said, could mean emotions (of tone, expression, words used) and other subtle parameters that do not ordinary lend themselves to quantification. As an example, he says, even sarcasm can be recognised and recorded.

Talk pattern analysis does allow one to do that. So that, if a BPO employee or a caller uses very innocuous words but implies sarcasm, this would get recorded. So too, other ambiguities, such as whether a call centre employee or the caller-customer, in saying something, did imply a commitment or not, and the like.

Such matters, of course, could be extremely culture-specific, but all these possibilities have been built into the solutions, says Mr Shani.

And, the US customers of BPOs in India and other countries are increasingly demanding that such solutions be put in place. This is to ensure the presence of compliance and quality records.

"This helps to address many of the business outsourcing issues that they have with respect to the US and the UK clients and helps them monitor for irregularities."

Banks such as HSBC and Barclays overseas are using the solutions to capture `voice of trades' when communicating with their clients.

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
WNS revenues up 60 per cent

Acquisitions critical for growth as time to market gets shorter: Subex CEO

Mahindra BT plans software centre in Kolkata

TRAI releases consultation paper on ILD segment

Looking Back

NICE tool for contact centres — Voice analysis to capture shades of emotions

T.K. Kurien to head Wipro BPO unit

New head of Symphony Data

Market is hot as ever: Forrester