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Your customers are talking. Are you listening? Many of them speak volumes about their experiences with you but deny your requests to give formal opinions. They provide critical feedback about your brand, but they don't want to talk to you about it. These customers are known as your "silent majority." You won't hear from them directly through traditional methods such as phone and online surveys. While sentiment scoring captures valuable interactions with live customer agents, the majority remains silent. They express the joy and pain of doing business with you through their journeys. However, they still fully expect for you to hear and respond to what they are experiencing. They are a majority. Are you listening?

In late April, NICE convened Interactions 2019 and all roads to secure and convenient customer emanated from three foundational elements: "The Cloud, Analytics, 'Digital & AI' and Automation." For more detail on the event see this post. Of these major components, the speech analytics resources developed by NICE Nexidia, which was acquired three years ago, were of special interest to me, especially as I home into how analytics is being elegantly integrated with the company's internally-developed, market leading voice-based identification and authentication capabilities.

My first introduction to the concept of speech analytics occurred with an on-site visit by a vendor about 12 years ago, when at a prior employer I was a user of digital recording primarily for QA purposes. I’ll honestly admit that my initial impression and lingering thoughts following the meeting were something along these lines: “That seems pretty cool, but it’s an awful lot of money to just detect a couple of words in the calls.” and “How could this technology possibly help us? We have monitoring teams in place who collect a bunch of data for us already, so what’s the big deal?” Fast forward a couple of years, and found myself accepting a job at NICE as a Business Consultant supporting the Interaction Analytics solution. (Talk about a 180-degree turn, huh?) But even then, as I learned the ropes on how to use the solution and got my first few clients up and running, I still didn’t comprehend the full power of the technology I was supporting. After five years as part of a team of NICE consultants, I made another career change to once again be the customer versus the vendor. The organization I joined was already bought-in to the concept of analytics, and we continually produced impressive results (annually achieving sufficient ROI to more than cover the costs of the solutions we had in place). Now, with over five years of tenure at my current company, we’re kicking things into high gear. Our recent upgrade from NICE IA to Nexidia Analytics was successful, and through the migration we deliberately broke-out of the constraints of primarily supporting the operational contact centers and instead have taken a full enterprise-wide approach to our services. So what’s my point? The point is that as I reflect back through the last 12 years of my career, my appreciation for and application of speech analytics has certainly evolved. And as much as I’d like to consider myself a pretty knowledgeable guy when it comes to this technology, I continue to learn new things and to discover new ways to apply the solutions on a regular basis. Here are some of the many ways we’ve found success utilizing speech analytics technology far beyond the skeptical and limited “detection of a couple of words in the calls” mindset I started with years ago: - Customer Experience correlations by Call Type (allowing for trending, alerts, and rapid root cause analysis to continually improve Customer Experience) - Self-Service Containment improvements (allowing for relatively flat agent staffing levels despite rapid growth and notably increased inbound call volume) - Automated detection of Potential Risk (increasing insight and quality control coverage while significantly reducing testing team FTE requirements) - Census testing of Revenue-Generating Offers (bringing awareness and accountability of agent behaviors and enhancing offer effectiveness) - Best Practices sharing with a “social media-style feed” of call examples versus the legacy “call library” concept (enhancing agent recognition, coaching, training, and motivation) In summary, I am a believer in and advocate of Interaction Analytics. I’m open to ideas and to the discovery of new ways to put this technology to use. And for those of you out there who are skeptical or who are wondering “What’s the big deal?”, just know that an open mind and a willingness to succeed despite your doubts can take you a long way. Whether you’re new to the idea of Interaction Analytics or you’re a seasoned veteran user like me, I invite you to join our new virtual NUG Analytics Chapter where we can share our success stories, compare lessons learned, exchange best practices, and compile a repository of materials and resources

Whether you're addressing a room full of people or talking to somebody one-on-one, making a presentation can be a stressful experience as it is, and the behavior of your audience can throw you off your game completely, if you don't know how to correctly interpret it.

The global contact center industry is standing on the cusp of a new era in the customer experience, bringing with it changes to the contact center industry that are unprecedented. The primary drivers behind these expected changes are the preferences, expectations, and demands of the next generation of customers; the Millennials and Generation Z.

There is nothing more expensive than a missed opportunity. In the new experience economy every customer's journey must be personalized to customer needs, effortless to navigate and seamless through every touchpoint. Anytime the journey is interrupted by poor customer service, that experience may negatively influence future touchpoints, even when previous interactions have exceeded customer expectation. When superior customer experience is not carried across all touchpoints, a golden opportunity is missed and the cost to pay in customer relations may prove to be substantial.

Performance and consistency in business can only be created with innovation and inspiration. TransUnion recently worked with us to produce a tremendous Nexidia Analytics success story, where they worked first to meet the Four V's of Big Data, but then they challenged NICE Nexidia to meet the same criteria from the standpoint of data analysis: Velocity (the pace of incoming data); Volume (the amount of data generated); Veracity (transparent, objective analysis); and Variety (omnichannel sources, structured and unstructured). Read on to learn more about how Nexidia Analytics met TransUnion's high standards.