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Envision's new speech analytics solution will encourage the industry to open up to the mid-market
Jun 12, 2009 (Datamonitor via COMTEX) --
Workforce optimization technologies vendor Envision launched InteractionIQ, a speech analytics product, on June 1, 2009, with the aim of simplifying the deployment of the technology and reducing the cost of ownership. Considering the solution's appeal among small to medium-sized firms, it is likely that Envision's competitors will feel compelled to follow suit.
Speech analytics (SA) is becoming better integrated in workforce optimization product suites. Although the market for this technology is relatively small, it is growing, and there were a few large-sized deployments in 2008. Enterprises have been hesitant to adopt SA because of concerns over cost and accuracy, but a wider availability of solutions at better price points will help to change perceptions of the technology. SA is moving away from being an emerging technology and becoming an applied business solution aimed at helping enterprises to understand why customers are calling and discover problems quickly so that they can be resolved.
Envision launched InteractionIQ on June 1, 2009. The company is a specialist workforce optimization technologies (WOTs) vendor offering a suite of products including logging, quality monitoring (QM), workforce management (WFM), performance management, eCoaching and analytics. InteractionIQ is integrated with Envision's Centricity platform, which unifies all of its WOTs solutions. The product is a scaled-down SA offering designed to make the technology more affordable while still providing core functionality, such as finding relevant calls with particular words or pre-set phrases. To date, Envision has partnered with Utopy to provide SA, and will continue to do so for those customers looking for a more comprehensive SA solution.
The move is well timed for Envision. SA is an emerging technology, relevant in the current difficult economic climate because it aids enterprises in understanding customers' reasons for calling: issues can be settled faster and enterprises can reduce costs by improving first call resolution. Envision has a strong position in the mid-market, and this solution will appeal to its customers. SA completes its range of homegrown WOTs and helps to increase the value of its offering substantially, as its products are bundled and sold in a suite.
The market for SA is relatively immature. Enterprises have found it difficult to justify the cost for deploying SA, and many have been focused on deploying core workforce optimization technologies such as logging, QM and WFM. Companies traditionally perceived the cost of implementing SA and the associated services as being too high. In addition, there is often an unclear understanding of how SA can help to resolve business goals. However, there have been a few deployments, mainly in the financial services and communications verticals, to address regulatory requirements and customer retention issues.
Although there are already a number of available SA solutions on the market, Datamonitor believes that Envision has made a wise move. The market is currently made up of standalone SA players, such as Aurix, Callminer, Nexidia and Utopy, which are focused solely on SA and provide best-of-breed offerings, and suite players NICE and Verint, which offer SA as part of their full WOTs solutions. Solutions have typically been targeted at large enterprises, but Envision has come to market with a different approach. Datamonitor believes that the launch of InteractionIQ will help to bring price points down and make the technology more accessible to mid-market enterprises. Such businesses also have a need to understand customers' reasons for calling and improve first call resolution, but price has been a key inhibitor in their adoption of SA. These clients will now be able to deploy SA at a more affordable cost. This can only be a good thing for Envision's customers, which will be able to implement solutions faster with lower implementation costs.
Envision is helping to drive change in the market, which is becoming less about differentiating technology by large vocabulary conversational speech recognition (LVCSR) or phoneme-based approaches, but rather more about packaging the technology around core business processes. Enterprises will begin to understand that SA is not an emerging technology but a practical business solution and, despite the recession, Datamonitor views this as a growing market. Datamonitor predicts that SA spending will grow at a CAGR of 14% between 2009 and 2014. Enterprises are increasingly focused on cost reduction and can utilize SA to understand customers' reasons for calling and pinpointing issues. Improving first call resolution rates is imperative, and the technology can be used directly to assist with this.
Following the launch of InteractionIQ, other SA vendors will need to use innovative packaging and pricing in order to compete. Nexidia was among the first vendors to develop a visible strategy that addressed business concerns. It offers an on-demand solution to assist with capital expenditure concerns and its Quickstart program allows enterprises to carry out a 90-day pilot focusing on business objectives. Envision's competitors are likely to follow suit in developing their own SA solutions or packaging the products they already have to address the mid-market. Another suite WOTs vendor, VPI, plans to bring to market an SA solution integrated with its WOTs platform during the latter half of 2009. VPI aims to improve the accuracy of SA while reducing server processing requirements and therefore total cost of ownership (TCO). It intends to leverage its desktop screen analytics call classification technology and enhance its solution, which will enable it to better compete with NICE, Verint and Envision. Verint is already offering Impact 360 SA Essentials, a version of its solution targeted at small to medium-sized enterprises. This focuses on term trend analysis and is offered at a more accessible price point than the full product, requiring no customization or advanced setup.
The challenges for Envision's InteractionIQ include competition from well-established SA vendors. It has a smaller market share and presence than some of its larger rivals such as NICE and Verint, and the addition of SA may not necessarily help it to win new customers. Envision's SA is a new addition to its portfolio, and it will need to convince its customers that the product is reliable and valuable. However, the solution will help the vendor upsell to current customers and enhance the value of its Centricity platform.
As enterprises become more customer-centric and look to extract information from existing call data, they are beginning to see the need for SA. The technology helps to provide root cause analysis, aids in addressing customer attrition and improves agent coaching. InteractionIQ specifically addresses enterprises' concerns over technology complexity and high TCO, and will therefore help to introduce the technology to a wider audience. SA is starting to be integrated into WOTs product suites, and Envision's move will force other vendors to develop more price-competitive, packaged solutions in the mid-market.
Aphrodite Brinsmead
http://www.datamonitor.com
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