Analyst Perspectives

Nexidia is a leading vendor of speech analytics vendor. I recently wrote about how it has enhanced its architecture to include text analytics and improve overall system performance. Version 11 of its Neural Phonetic Speech Analytics continues these enhancements to make the product faster and more accurate in its results.

The company recently announced a new product, Compliance Management. It is designed to help financial service companies meet the increasing number of regulatory requirements. The concept is simple: Many financial services activities are carried out by telephone (including sales, trading and responding to customer requests), and many of the calls have to include statements to satisfy regulations. Capturing these calls (perhaps in real time) and applying advanced speech analytics to them allow managers to ascertain whether the employee spoke the prescribed words and where corrective action must be taken. Achieving this goal, like so many other things, is far from simple. Nexidia’s tools can capture calls and use analysis to determine what was said. Compliance Management adds workflow capabilities and a rules engine that together define what should be said, how calls should flow, what actions to take based on the type and content of the call, and who should be notified if the right information wasn’t given. Additional capabilities enable integration of this to other products (for example, a CRM system to obtain additional customer data), and reporting and analysis show how well individual agents are performing and whether the end-to-end process is complete. In short, Nexidia Compliance Management helps financial services management keep a close eye on how fully their employees are complying with regulations and enables them to take preventive or corrective action when rules are broken.

Our benchmark research into next-generation customer engagement shows that only a minority (18%) of companies currently regard satisfying regulatory requirements as a top priority in the context of trying to improve the customer experience. However, in highly regulated industries such as financial services this priority rises to 27 percent; in some high-profile cases such companies have been hit with costly penalties for failing to comply with regulations. As regulations increase and competition for customers becomes more intense, I expect more companies to look for tools to help them mitigate those risks. Overall I also expect the trend to deploy speech analytics to increase. In our benchmark research into next-generation customer analytics 29 percent of participants said they plan to improve their use of analytics, and the most-often cited driver for doing that is to improve the customer experience (by 55%). Our research regularly confirms that the most popular channel of interaction with customers is still the telephone, so understanding the content of calls is vital to understanding and improving not just the way calls are handled but customer service, marketing and even products and services. Finding such insights requires a process similar to that supported by Nexidia Compliance Management: understand what was said and about what and take action to improve where necessary. I recommend that companies facing stringent regulatory requirements, not only in financial services, evaluate how it can help them comply with regulations and improve the customer experience and business outcomes.

Regards,

Richard J. Snow

VP & Research Director