The panel discussions at the Conversational Commerce Conference (C3) were punctuated by vendor demos. In two cases, attendees were given a glimpse of real world instances where companies and their customers both benefit from implementations of real-time speech analytics. Joint sponsors Cisco and Spanlink showed the Collaborative Contact Center suite as instantiated both on premises and in the cloud for businesses of all sizes. On Day Two, Marchex gave an impressive showing for Call Miner, a speech analytics function that augments its popular Call Analytics product line.

In October 2010, we discussed how Cisco had baked real-time analytics from Nexidia into Social Miner, a core function of its its solution into its Collaborative Contact Center. As I noted in this post, Spanlink has moved SocialMiner into the cloud in order to make it more attractive to smaller companies, by giving them a mechanism to purchase access as a service.

Marchex’s John Busby impressed C3 attendees by showcasing how “call analytics” can be used to understand, measure and tweak the ROI of advertising campaigns and communications channels by adding “Call Mining” to it Call Analytics products in order to identify the purpose of a call and the intent of a caller. More specifically its system spots the words or clusters of words that correlate with sales conversions. Thus they can help businesses of all sizes tweaked their messaging to get better at turning prospects into customers.

As a participant in and sponsor of C3, Marchex provides a real-world demonstration of how “silo busting” – while it may sound violent – is actually a constructive activity. Marchex had a core competency around small business marketing, especially phone-based, directive advertising. Over the years it has added products to support multiple advertising channels, all of which promote phone calls and conversations. The addition of Call Mining confirms that its customers know that recognizing intent in the course of a conversation is especially important as businesses of all sizes try to build customer loyalty and relationships.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Contact Center, Analytics, conversational commerce