The "Driving Innovation" conference built on the keynote theme of the call center as a vital strategic asset. Quality monitoring of customer interactions not only provides foundation information for workforce management and agent performance optimization, but also enables optimization and alignment of customer-facing processes elsewhere in the organization. Product feature presentations and demonstrations spoke to these issues, but the most compelling evidence came in customer testimonials and case studies that highlighted data mining of conversations and extending quality monitoring into the back office. In the opinion of Ventana Research, the eQuality suite from Witness Systems nicely extends its quality monitoring foundation with optimized analytical capabilities to leverage the effort of achieving multi-functional organizational alignment.

Assessment

The tone of Witness Systems' annual user conference, "Driving Innovation" was established early in opening addresses by keynoter Kathleen Peterson, Chief Vision Officer at Powerhouse Consulting and Witness CEO Dave Gould. The message was simple: the contact center plays an increasingly vital role as a strategic asset within today's enterprise.

The call center is the focal point of a large proportion of an organization's contact with its customers, and it provides a wealth of insight into the performance of the entire enterprise. Call center diagnostics can provide feedback on product quality and capability, the effectiveness of marketing programs, back office operation efficiency, legal compliance, training needs, and activity-based costing. Call center infrastructure and analytics are key enabling technologies for optimizing and aligning customer service processes up and down the enterprise.

Workforce optimization is no longer the sole application of the data that come from the call center. Call center maturity is enabling more advanced analytical applications built upon the foundation of customer interaction. Witness Systems is clearly positioning its full range of performance management reporting and analytics as the bridge between operational CRM and enterprise analytics.

Release 6 of the eQuality suite was overviewed, highlighting its key new features. These include advanced conditional business rules capability, higher volume call recording capacity, "follow the contact" recording of transferred or conferenced interactions, and voice or text annotation of recorded call playback.

Of greater interest to Ventana Research are the innovative applications that leverage the core functionality of the eQuality product suite. Two examples were initiatives announced in February 2004. One illustrates the extension of call center analytical capability deeper into the customer interaction; the other is an example of extending the domain horizontally.

Call Miner - Delving deeper into understanding customer interactions within the call center, Call Miner takes interactive voice recording (IVR) into the realm of data mining. In a compelling customer case study, inbound call mix analysis was greatly enhanced and simplified by mining a selection of calls for keywords uttered in the voice-recorded conversations. Calls are thus easily classified and tallied, providing consistent, persistent insight into the nature of incoming calls, and delivering a solid basis for root cause analysis by type of call. This knowledge directly influences business initiatives within marketing and sales as well as agent coaching and training.

Back Office - Extending the insight gained within the call center, the Witness Back Office initiative takes advantage of root cause findings derived from call content analysis. Customer contacts can reveal a variety of process and execution problems, including data entry errors, slow or erroneous billing cycles, marketing misinformation, consumer fraud, customer education needs, and more. One customer case study cited significant order fulfillment productivity gains and procedural quality improvements after implementing the eQuality suite and applying call center operational principles in an order fulfillment center.

Ventana Research has long subscribed to the notion that an operation that is optimally aligned to strategic objectives will improve its performance and elevate its value to the enterprise. Witness Systems brings much to its customers to enable call center performance improvement on this dimension. We do see Witness facing challenges as it extends its offerings beyond its quality monitoring sweet spot. Its back office initiative, while welcome from our perspective, likely faces a struggle gaining credibility with functional decision makers outside the call center and outside the community of customer organizations that have deployed call centers.

Market Impact

In the core voice recorded quality monitoring market, Witness holds a dominant position. NICE Systems tends to lag Witness in delivering innovative functionality, and is not as focused on quality monitoring. Verint, while commanding much smaller market share in the quality-monitoring arena, has shown solid innovative tendencies, with a special focus on directing quality initiatives outside the call center, putting a focus on understanding the customer side of interactions.

Major ERP vendors including Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel and SAP all provide some portion of the application software that forms the call center operational infrastructure. Most are also advancing capabilities in VoIP (voice over IP) and IVR (interactive voice response) to varying degrees, most often manifested as development tools. No evidence exists that any of these vendors has built any voice-recorded quality monitoring domain expertise into its call center offering. Nor is there evidence of pursuing analytical applications for optimizing call center performance on those data sets.

Among analytical vendors active within the call center, applications tend to maintain focus on workforce management and/or agent performance optimization. IEX, Pipkins, Performix, Opus Group, Blue Pumpkin and others fall into this category. All tend to provide compatible functionality to Witness - indeed, several were sponsors of this event. Competitive impact among these vendors is not seen as significant in the immediate term.

Advanced predictive modeling platforms are also active in overall CRM analytics, most with offerings geared to call center. These include SPSS, SAS, Fair Isaac, KXEN, and others. None of these has shown any inclination for addressing analysis of recorded-voice data as part of their predictive modeling solutions. We do not expect this to change.

Recommendation

Ventana Research suggests that all organizations to take a strategic approach to evaluating contact center effectiveness, including the use of voice-record monitoring for quality control and root cause analysis. As focal point of customer contact for many organizations, the call center's value to the organization as a competitive differentiator should not be overlooked. If your business objectives place any priority on call center quality monitoring and/or gaining greater analytical insight into repetitive operational activity, the eQuality suite from Witness can contribute to your customer-centric performance improvement initiatives.