Analyst Perspectives

Our benchmark research into the next-generation contact center in the cloud confirms what most people intuitively know – that consumers now engage with each other and organizations through more communication channels than a few years ago and that many of these are speech- and text-based. Companies are therefore generating large volumes of voice recordings and textual records. They contain vital information about what customers feel about issues connected to their dealings with the organization – marketing messages the sales process, product and service quality, and employee behavior, among others. The challenge for organizations is to extract insights from these unstructured records and take action to benefit the business based on those insights. When it was founded in 2002, CallMiner set out to support organizations in that quest, and in 2012 it won a Ventana Research Technology Innovation awards.

The company now has three products in its portfolio: CallMiner Eureka, MyEureka and EurekaLive. Eureka, its central platform, supports all the other products. It includes capabilities to set up the products, administer settings, set up rules and centralize a series of APIs that allow integration with multiple third-party products, especially CRM. Our research into next-generation customer analytics shows that accessing the required data is the biggest hurdle organizations have to overcome as they implement any form of customer-related analytics. During a demonstration I saw that CallMiner has put a lot of effort into addressing this issue in ways that make it easy to use by business users, with minimal support from IT. The Eureka platform also makes the whole portfolio scalable, secure and stable.

MyEureka has some new detailed capabilities, but as its core it remains the same product that won our Innovation Award. Its display and sharing capabilities are still some of the most advanced I have seen. It now has more alerting capabilities so managers and individuals receive notices of performance information and actions they should take.

As its name implies, EurekaLive analyzes the content of calls as they are happening. It can be configured to spot words agent shouldn’t use, phrases they should say but don’t, and most importantly key words or phrases used by the caller. This analysis can be used to alert managers or supervisors to listen in to a call or to advise agents as to the next best action. Any content within a call that triggers an alert can be captured and annotated for further review, for example as part of the agent quality management process.

Taken as a whole these three products provide a comprehensive set of analytics capabilities that make it easy to access data, process structured and unstructured data, visualize performance information, calculate and display key performance metrics and raise alerts based on preconfigured rules. CallMiner has also taken the step of creating an app store – EurekaXchange – into which its partners can add custom-built modules for organizations to build into their solutions, for example, calculation and display of specific performance information and metrics.

Our contact center in the cloud research shows that differentiating through customer experience is now the top priority for organizations. It also shows that although the adoption of self-service applications will increase, the phone call is far from obsolete; most organizations see call volumes increasing. Call recordings and real-time analysis of live calls therefore can provide essential insights into what customers are saying about an organization and its products and services. I recommend all companies seeking to enhance the customer experience assess how CallMiner can help them uncover such insights and identify actions to take toward that end.

Regards,

Richard Snow

VP & Research Director Customer Engagement