DMG Report: Speech Analytics Software Market Seeing Rapid Growth

A new report from contact center consultancy DMG Consulting shows that the speech analytics software market has grown rapidly since 2004 and will continue to grow over the next four years, despite the recession.

 

The firm’s 2009-2010 Speech Analytics Market Report predicts the market will witness year-over-year growth of 45 percent in 2009, 40 percent in 2010, 42 percent in 2011, 32 percent in 2012 and 25 percent in 2013.

 

According to DMG, “speech analytics has been one of the fastest growing contact center technology sectors since its introduction in 2004.” The firm’s research shows that the market grew from 25 commercial implementations that year to 1,764 at the end of 2008 -- a five-year compounded annual growth rate of 190 percent.

 

"Speech/interaction analytics continues to come on strong, despite the worldwide economic recession," said Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting, in a release. "Speech/interaction analytics' ability to convert unstructured customer conversations and communications into actionable structured insights make these applications extremely beneficial for organizations of all sizes. DMG predicts that at least 25 to 30 percent of all contact center seats will have speech analytics within the next five to seven years."

 

Speech analytics software is used to “mine” recorded interactions to arrive at deep insights into agent performance and customer behavior. In turn these insights can be used to drive key business decisions.

Today’s speech analytics solutions go far beyond simple word and phrase spotting – in fact they have advanced to the point where they can be used to detect certain emotional responses.

Using speech analytics software, contact centers can mine vast reams of recorded interactions in order to uncover trends that simply cannot be detected be manually listening in on calls. For example, there might be a certain phrase or word in an agent script that results in a negative or even indifferent response in a high percentage of customers. This could lead to a business decision to remove or change that term or phrase in order to elicit a more positive response.

By the same token, customers might consistently respond to a certain phrase by referring to a competitor, in which case the company might do an investigation to find out why customers are bringing the competitor’s name up at that particular point in the script.

Contact centers can also learn a lot about how their agents are handling calls by mining recorded interactions. By combing this data with screen capture, online customer reviews and other historical customer data gleaned through CRM and other systems, companies can gain a much more holistic view of how they are handling customer service.

In addition to uncovering trends in agent performance and customer behavior, companies can proactively identify sales opportunities, reduce corporate risk, ensure regulatory compliance and improve operational efficiencies across the organization.

Adoption of speech analytics is expected to increase for several reasons: First, the solutions are much simpler to deploy and integrate with other systems, including the leading call recording systems, than they were a few years back.

In addition, they are simpler to use – many of today’s solutions offer simplified out-of-the-box reporting and intuitive interfaces that make it many times easier for an average user to figure the system out and use it effectively. Whereas the solutions of a few years ago required that a company have an extra IT person or dedicated speech analytics “expert” on hand to help configure and monitor the system -- as well as to help interpret the results.

DMG’s 2009-2010 Speech Analytics Market Report takes a critical and in-depth look at this dynamic and fast-growing sector. It focuses on the market, vendors, technology, products, capabilities, trends, competitive landscape, benefits and ROI, market share and pricing.

 

The report includes nine customer case studies with quantified benefits; a detailed pricing analysis for licensed, hosted and managed services offerings; and DMG's customer satisfaction study.

It also addresses the political issue of which department should "own" speech analytics -- and whether or not these solutions are taking the place of quality assurance systems. In addition it delivers best practices and offers suggestions for avoiding common implementation pitfalls.

 

Vendors covered in the report include Autonomy etalk, CallMiner (News - Alert), Nexidia, NICE, OnviSource, UTOPY and Verint.

The Report also analyzes four emerging solutions from Aurix, BBN, CallCopy and Envision, and provides a high-level assessment of the speech analytics capabilities from Aspect (News - Alert), Calabrio, Cisco, eLoyalty, Interactive Intelligence, KnoahSoft, Noble, Nuance, VPI and SER.