The fact that impressed me most at this year’s SpeechTEK was that speech processing technologies – meaning core automated speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis and even my pet interest voice biometric-based speaker identification or authentication – were not front and center.
As customer care spans multiple modalities requiring real-time responses, “Analytics” has become an all-purpose word that embraces monitoring and recording, knowledge management, business intelligence, word spotting, data mining and analysis of data from a multiplicity of sources. Yet the most important aspect of new systems is the ability to correlate measured activity in ACDs, IVRs and agent workstations with overall business objectives, including customer satisfaction and retention, increased sales, agent productivity and, ultimately, profitability.