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NICE tool for contact centers
By agencies
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Tuesday, 07 June 2005, 19:30 IST
BANGALORE: The Israel-based NICE Systems Ltd has found a nice pasture for business in India.
It has come armed with the solutions it has developed for recording and analyzing every word, emotion and exchange in contact center multimedia interactions. These mountains of information are then be digitized, 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?
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, Shani said that his company's specialization is in storing and analyzing unstructured data in a variety of combinations.
Unstructured data, 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 recognized 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 center 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 Shani.
And, the U.S. 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 U.S. 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.