Call mining gets a boost

Recording telephone conversations between customers and agents is commonplace in call centers. Usually it's done for quality or regulatory purposes with technology that automatically records, logs and stores the audio files.

What happens to those recorded assets often is considerably less high-tech. A manager might randomly select a few phone calls per month for each agent and listen to replays to evaluate agent performance. Or training staff might single out calls that resulted in a strong sale to use for educational purposes. But often companies simply ignore the bulk of recorded assets because it's too expensive and time-consuming to manually review thousands of customer phone calls.

These days, call-mining specialists such as CallMiner and Nexidia and larger speech technology vendors such as ScanSoft and Witness Systems are aiming to change that with technology that does for audio assets what business intelligence software does for structured data.

Call-mining technology combines speech recognition, speech analysis and data-mining capabilities to make it easy for companies to find specific information in audio archives and spot service gaps, sales opportunities and emerging customer trends.

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Recording telephone conversations between customers and agents is commonplace in call centers. Usually it's done for quality or regulatory purposes with technology that automatically records, logs and stores the audio files.

What happens to those recorded assets often is considerably less high-tech. A manager might randomly select a few phone calls per month for each agent and listen to replays to evaluate agent performance. Or training staff might single out calls that resulted in a strong sale to use for educational purposes. But often companies simply ignore the bulk of recorded assets because it's too expensive and time-consuming to manually review thousands of customer phone calls.

These days, call-mining specialists such as CallMiner and Nexidia and larger speech technology vendors such as ScanSoft and Witness Systems are aiming to change that with technology that does for audio assets what business intelligence software does for structured data.

Call-mining technology combines speech recognition, speech analysis and data-mining capabilities to make it easy for companies to find specific information in audio archives and spot service gaps, sales opportunities and emerging customer trends.

The software can run keyword-based searches to find instances when callers spoke certain product names or used phrases associated with dissatisfaction such as "speak to a manager." The software also correlates different attributes of calls to report trends - such as how often the mention of a competitor's product resulted in a service cancellation.

One prison uses technology from start-up CallMiner to ferret out code words for contraband. The CallMiner software stores reference data about word-usage trends and can highlight when words that are not frequently used in normal conversation suddenly increase in prisoners' phone conversations, says Jeff Gallino, CEO of CallMiner.

In the past, by the time officials figured out "lollipop" was a code word for a certain drug, for example, the prisoners already would have started using a new code word. CallMiner's speech analytics can detect within a couple of hours when an atypical word suddenly is used more frequently, Gallino says.

Call-mining software also can search for phrases that agents didn't say - but maybe should have been by agents for legal reasons. For example, financial services transactions can require agents to cite regulatory disclosures to customers. Companies can search for instances when those disclosures were not made, but should have been, says Anna Convery, senior vice president of marketing and product management at Nexidia.

Continental Airlines is one early adopter that's rolling out call-mining software. The airline uses eQuality CallMiner - a call-mining platform that combines technology from CallMiner and Witness Systems - to perform automated call classification processes at its 900-agent reservation center in Tampa, Fla.

Continental classifies incoming calls into 50 different categories, depending on whether a customer called to book a flight, confirm flight information, change a seat assignment or redeem reward miles. With eQuality CallMiner, Continental automates the process of compiling its "call mix" survey.