In addition to the announcements, Enghouse Interactive leaders have been highlighted in industry publications:

• Alex Black’s article, Looking Across the Full Spectrum of Customer Interactions, was published in the May edition of Contact Center Pipeline
• J.R. Sloan’s article, “The Disconnect Between Real and Perceived Customer Service,” was published on CMS Wire
• Alex Black’s article, ”IT’s Role in Delivering Top-Notch Customer Service,” was published on 1to1 Media

The survey revealed that 71% of virtualized contact centers reported a decrease in queue lengths, with almost 2/3 also seeing a smoothing of call spikes. Additionally, 42% of respondents accommodate some agent homeworking, more than tripling the number since 2007.

A few additional survey statistics of note:

• 27% of multi-site contact centers have not virtualized their operations
• 68% of the users of cloud-based contact center solutions said that they now have more powerful and flexible functionality
• 63% of cloud-based contact center solution users experienced a lower cost of ownership

“The economic crisis of the past few years has translated into generally low levels of investment in contact center technology. The results from this year’s survey show an industry-wide acknowledgment that IT systems require urgent improvement. Most businesses are looking into cloud-based solutions as an option that can often provide increased functionality with a favorable cost-structure.”

- Steve Morrell, ContactBabel

Black writes:

IT decision-makers are more closely aligned with customer service than most people are aware. Obviously, customer service and the technology that enables it are closely related, but what may have escaped most people’s attention is how much IT actually cares about delivering good customer service. In a recent survey commissioned by Enghouse Interactive, we discovered that 65 percent of U.S.-based IT decision-makers do in fact feel personal pressure to deliver on this front. So why is this? Why are IT decision-makers feeling responsible for their company’s customer service?

What do you think? Read the complete article at 1to1 Media, and let us join us in the conversation about IT’s role is in delivering top-notch customer service experiences.

Today, Enghouse Interactive announced the availability of Intuition Acclaim 5.2, the latest in the Datapulse line of leading console and directory applications for Avaya PBXs. The latest release adds direct IP connectivity for Avaya CS1000 plus a number of new and enhanced features, including click to dial and extended support for Microsoft Lync and other Microsoft products.

Enghouse Interactive’s Intuition Acclaim IP Attendant enables users of Avaya CS1000 version 7 and higher to eliminate the need for digital line cards as well as M2250 (CIU) phones on attendant desktops, allowing enterprises to have greater flexibility in where and how they deploy operator/attendant consoles. The inherent location and hardware independence enables attendants to be placed anywhere in the network and moved as needed.

In addition to new connectivity options, Intuition Acclaim 5.2 adds a host of enhancements at endpoints and behind the scenes. Attendants can take advantage of the new click-to-dial feature from any supported application or Web page to dial numbers directly. Organizations can run more efficiently using new operator statistics and real-time monitoring to track and control operator availability, utilization, status, along with other historical reporting options. Version 5.2 includes enhanced Microsoft Lync integration for presence and instant messaging along with support for the latest Microsoft desktop and server environments including Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and SQL Server 2008.

“We are the first Avaya DevConnect partner in the market to natively support Avaya’s IP Attendant. This latest release builds upon our rich heritage and deep level of integration with and commitment to the CS1000 line that dates back a decade and a half into the Nortel era. Enterprises can count on Enghouse Interactive to provide console solutions that help them provide better, more cost effective and efficient service to their customers and internal staff. ”

- Anthony Stephenson, product director for Enghouse Interactive’s Datapulse portfolio

View the complete press release or visit the Intuition Acclaim product page to learn more.

The term Customer Interaction Analytics refers to the analysis of all interactions between contact centers and customers, whether that interaction was via telephone, email, a web chat session, or even social media. Such conversations are “free-form” by their nature, hence any data captured from the interaction will be unstructured by definition, which makes this data more difficult to analyze. However, there is an enormous amount of valuable information hidden in this mountain of unstructured data, and analytics technology has evolved to the point that the customer interaction analytics technology available today is very effective at capturing the voice of the customer and improving contact center performance based upon information gleaned from interactions.

The evolution of analytics

In the late 1990s, data warehousing was a big growth industry, especially in sectors such as retail, where the widespread usage of customer loyalty cards gave huge amounts of data about customers, their buying patterns and preferences. However, getting the data into storage was not the difficult part: the greatest value came from being able to identify and analyze the relevant and insightful patterns within these data, through data mining. In many cases, the reality never lived up to the hype, as the analytical capabilities of data mining tools and
businesses’ ability to use them effectively did not match the ease with which the data warehouse was filled in the first place.

Customer interaction analytics solutions are analogous with the data warehousing and mining applications in as far as they analyze huge quantities of data – here, unstructured data such as call recordings or emails, etc. – and identify important and insightful patterns in customer and agent activity. Hence, speech analytics is also called audio mining (it should be noted that some speech analytics solutions act in real-time, so the analogy is not quite exact), and text analytics is also called text mining. However, unlike the gap in functionality between data
warehousing and data mining that we saw a decade ago, customer interaction analytics solutions offer a proven and insightful option to release the customer value that is stored in these enormous quantities of information: insight about the customer, the agent, the business processes and the products and services that the business sells.

Speech Analytics

Within the contact center industry, speech analytics is probably the best understood and most used aspect of customer interaction analytics. The first speech analytics product for commercial purposes was released in 2002 (before then, the technology was used primarily for government intelligence purposes). Since 2002 the technology has improved considerably, as have the number of successful customer implementations.

The elements of speech analytics

There are various elements to speech analytics solutions, including:

• Speech engine: a software program that recognizes speech and converts it into data (usually either phonemes
• the sounds that go to make up words – or as a text transcription, although there are solutions which directly recognize entire spoken phrases and categorize calls with higher accuracy based upon the occurrence of those phrases, as no data is lost in conversion ).
• Indexing layer: a software layer that improves and indexes the output from the speech engine (when the speech engine is phonetic or speech-to-text) in order to make it searchable
• Query and search user interface: the desktop application where users interact with the speech analytics software, defining their requirements and carrying out searches on the indexed data
• Reporting applications: the presentation layer of speech analytics, often in graphical format
• Business applications: provided by vendors, these pre-defined modules help improve agent coaching and/or quality monitoring with speech analytics data, or look at specific issues such as adherence to script, debt collections etc, and provide suggestions on what to look for.

Speech analytics solutions are in use in 24% of our respondents’ operations, with the services, outsourcing and finance respondents more likely to be using it. There is an appreciable amount of interest in implementing within the near future, with 14% overall stating that this is likely, a figure which is particularly high in the medical and insurance sectors.

>> Click here to download the entire 2012 ContactBabel Decision Makers Guide

For the past decade, there has been increasing desire within contact centers to improve upon customer satisfaction and experience, in order to keep customers loyal and profitable for longer. ContactBabel studies have consistently shown that increasing customer satisfaction is the no.1 focus of US contact centers, outperforming other key areas such as decreasing costs or increasing sales.

Call recording and monitoring may have been around for a long time, but it is at the forefront of the battle to improve quality and thus customer satisfaction and loyalty. The new generation of interaction recording solutions brings the whole contact center into play, potentially gaining at several levels of the business through using the solution in different ways.

Call recording is one of the most prevalent contact center solutions, having many applications around quality assurance, compliance, security and agent training. It is used by 80% of respondents, 18% of which state that they wish to replace or upgrade their current system. Only 5% of respondents have no intention of using call recording.

The majority of respondents in all sectors surveyed, use call recording today, a solid background upon which new applications based on call recordings can thrive.

The use of call recording is influenced by the size of the contact center operation although the figure of 69% penetration in small operations shows that vendors have been able to offer solutions successfully at various price points.

>> Click here to download the entire 2012 ContactBabel Decision Makers Guide

The most widely-used forms of non-voice customer contact (apart from letters and fax) are email and self-service, followed by SMS, text chat and web collaboration. Despite the much lower penetration rates, it is also worth mentioning the presence of virtual worlds, avatars, kiosks and video agents in the customer contact mix as these are options which businesses may use to target the Internet generation as well as more technically-literate existing customers. Some of the key features that customers look for in a channel include:

• The perceived effectiveness of the channel: customers contact a business because they want something done. Feeling satisfied that their request has been taken care of is a vital ingredient to this – many contact centers still get calls asking if they have acted upon a customer’s email – and the reassurance provided by a real-time channel that an issue has been dealt with appropriately should not be underestimated
• Channel availability: one of the advantages of telephony has been its ubiquity. Almost every home has a telephone, and the wide uptake of mobile telephony has meant that the telephone has near-universal penetration. Of course, the rise of the cheap computer and the popularity of smartphones now means that the telephone is under serious challenge in the availability stakes
• Low cost of use: a particular issue for some people, with excessive amounts of time spent on hold in queue costing a significant amount of money
• Painlessness: a customer’s subjective view on how difficult and ‘painful’ the overall customer interaction experience has been, including the requirement for any follow-up interactions
• Speed of conclusion: this refers to the immediacy of response and the overall resolution time, including the need for any follow-up work, or waiting to get an answer
• Ease of use: familiarity also comes into this. Although it may seem as though most people are comfortable using a phone or computer, some IVR or speech recognition systems can make life more difficult than customers want.

>> Click here to download the entire 2012 ContactBabel Decision Makers Guide

Enghouse Interactive officially announced that it has appointed Christoph Mosing to the position of president, Enghouse Interactive USA. In this role, Mr. Mosing assumes responsibility for Enghouse Interactive’s operations in the Americas and will play a major role in aligning the organization to advance its strategic growth objectives.

“I am pleased to appoint Christoph to this role,” said Steve Sadler, CEO of Enghouse Systems Limited, the parent company of Enghouse Interactive, “as he has been a valuable contributor to the business since joining us as part of the Envox acquisition in 2008. I’m confident that his intimate knowledge of Enghouse Interactive and the markets it serves, along with his wealth of executive experience will position the company well for sustained growth and success.”

Mr. Mosing has nearly two decades of enterprise software and software-as-a-service (SaaS) executive experience. Prior to his appointment as president of Enghouse Interactive USA, Mr. Mosing served as vice president and general manager, global business development at Enghouse. He held a similar global business development executive role at Envox Worldwide, which specialized in IP-based communications solutions for enterprises, hosting companies and service providers. Prior to Envox, Mr. Mosing held senior executive positions at leading edge technology companies including TuVox, Inc., a leader in SaaS-based next-generation voice automation applications used by millions of consumers, and Convey Software, a provider of hybrid cloud based multilingual Content Management applications to Fortune 500 companies.

“I believe very strongly in the innovative software and talented people behind Enghouse Interactive,” shared Christoph. “I very much look forward to working with the team in shaping the company’s future direction to ensure we deliver the best interaction management solutions and services to our partners and customers.”

>> View the Enghouse Interactive press release for complete details.

Enghouse Interactive shared deeper insights from the recent Enghouse Interactive Customer Interaction Index on the mindset of U.S. IT executives when it comes to addressing three distinct classifications of customer interactions: structured, unstructured and self-service.

Structured interactions are defined as transactional in nature and are generally high volume, lower value communications handled by agents within a company’s contact centers. Unstructured interactions usually enter an organization through an operator or attendant and are typically lower in volume but higher in value with their more complex scope requiring a consultative approach to handle them efficiently and professionally. Self-service interactions, generally serviced through an automated resource such as IVR, enable customers to efficiently manage their own interactions entirely, or provide the front end to capture information for more efficient and satisfying structured or unstructured communications with live agents.

When Enghouse Interactive commissioned Kelton Research to survey 227 senior IT executives as to which type of interaction was most important to their organization, nearly 65% indicated that unstructured interactions are most valuable. The remainder of respondents was nearly evenly split in identifying self-service and unstructured interactions as most valuable. These figures are in line with observations that Enghouse Interactive has made over many years of experience with its own customer base. However, most IT executives felt that their organization was currently better at managing structured interactions with just 15% stating that they were best at handling unstructured interactions. This would indicate that there is a lot of opportunity for improvement in handling this type of interaction.

“We feel our approach to addressing the full-spectrum of interactions is unique in the market, so we established the Enghouse Interactive Customer Interaction Index to provide a reality check against our observations and assumptions so that we can ensure we continue to produce products that solve customer pain points ,” says Enghouse Interactive CTO, Alex Black. “The insights we gained from surveying these IT executives on interaction type usage and sentiment validates our strategy of addressing every type of customer interaction.”

>> View the Enghouse Interactive press release for complete details.

According to the Enghouse Interactive Customer Interaction Index, a survey released by Enghouse Interactive today, U.S. IT decision makers say good customer service is more important that managing costs. The Customer Interaction Index captures the state of customer interactions in U.S. businesses from the perspective of technology decision makers. Kelton Research, a leading national public opinion company, conducted the survey among 227 senior IT professionals from U.S.-based companies with revenues between $50 million and $1 billion annually.

Almost seven in ten (68%) of the IT decision-makers surveyed believe that delivering customer service is more important than managing costs, indicating that most U.S. companies are trying to put customer service at the heart of their business. Additionally, 65% of survey respondents stated that they feel personal pressure to help their company be recognized for providing good customer service.

“Currently, most U.S. businesses are pushing for better customer service, which is extremely positive. But businesses are in transition. They need to incorporate new methods of customer interactions into their portfolio. We can see from the data that newer technologies like mobile apps and social media are being treated seriously even though they currently make up a minority of customer interactions. The major concern we have is that newer technologies could make customer interactions more siloed if they are not handled within the context of a broader plan which can incorporate structured, unstructured and self-service interactions.”

- Alex Black, CTO, Enghouse Interactive

Other key findings from the report include:

• Non-traditional media, including social media, makes up the majority of customer interactions in just 2% of businesses
• 57% of businesses try their best to cater to the communication preferences of different demographics
• 33% of IT decision-makers spend 60% or more of their time trying to make business processes more efficient
• Only 7% of businesses say that they do not have any applications in the cloud

>> View the Enghouse Interactive press release for complete survey details.