NICE Takes Home Language Technology Innovative Award 2012

Customer interactions, whether they’re spoken or written, contain valuable information companies can use to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, improve operational efficiency, and gain a competitive advantage; but only if you have the technology to extract the content and aggregate it.

NICE Systems (News - Alert), a provider of workforce optimization solutions, offers many different solutions when it comes to interactions management. Speech analytics is a key capability of NICE Interaction Analytics because it helps identify the reasons why customers call the company, and what causes customer dissatisfaction. Its text analytics capability allows organizations to derive high-quality insights from customer interactions to better understand why customers contact the company and correct root-cause issues.

NICE is one of 12 recipients of the 2012 LT-Innovative Award for ingenuity in language technology (LT), demonstrating its interaction analytics expertise, specifically its technologies in speech and text analytics.

The Language Technology Innovation Forum, LT-Innovate Summit, was held on June 19, 2012 in Brussels for LT-Innovate members and other Language Technology stakeholders to network, discuss needs, strategies, innovation opportunities and business trends. The winners of the award were rated on innovation and technology excellence, business potential, team experience, investment or partnering interest and project profile quality.

“Receiving the LT-Innovate Award is a testament to NICE’s capabilities of its state of the art language analytics technology,” said Yochai Rozenblat, president of the NICE Enterprise Group. “NICE’s participation in the LT-Innovate Summit and in the FP7 program marks a significant leap forward in our collaboration with the European LT industry. Such a partnership allows NICE to gain positive exposure in an important market while expanding its relationships in the research community.”

NICE is currently developing a multilingual semantic inference platform – the first of its kind – that can recognize linguistic patterns across words and phrases and categorize them accordingly.

NICE’s semantic inference platform marks a new generation of text analytics capabilities for examining customer interactions. This technology will enable businesses to better analyze and make sense of customer statements across languages and channels, such as speech, e-mail and social media. For example, the statements “I waited too long” and “the service was slow” have the same meaning and would be displayed in relation to other complaints about service quality.

Based on these new insights, businesses can then improve contact center performance and service levels and enhance the customer experience.

From a scientific perspective, the goal is to create an open source platform with a generic infrastructure, something which has been lacking until now in the field of semantics technology. NICE has been advancing this technology through the EXCITEMENT project– Exploring Customer Interactions through Textual EntailMENT – which was established within the framework of the European Commission FP7 program for research and innovation. NICE’s participation in this program includes collaborating with leading human language research and academic institutes throughout Europe.

“NICE stands out as an innovator in the LT field,” said Philippe Wacker, secretary general of LT-Innovate. “We were particularly impressed with its multilingual interaction analytics platform, as this is exactly the type of technology that is needed to break down language barriers across Europe and make content accessible to all.”

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