In this day and age of metrics and measurement it’s really surprising how often we lose track of what it is that’s being measured. It seems that the tools themselves become the focus rather than the end goal the tools in question are supposed to enable.

This is as true in the customer service market as it is in any other domain.

This week, Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) announced a series of products designed to help organizations better measure and improve customer service by listening to the voice of the customer.

The first of the customer feedback management products being introduced is Interaction Feedback — an automated customer satisfaction survey module that enables organizations to accurately measure customer service levels in a timely and cost-effective way.

Contact centers measure all sorts of metrics that often do not tell whole story, and the number of employees using customer feedback is expanding beyond the formal contact center.

Interactive Intelligence has come up with a unique method of ensuring that the voice of the customer is heard and that the information gathered is put to good use.

The new automated interaction survey module runs on Interactive’s Interaction Center Platform, and the company has partnered with several leading customer survey organizations for surveys and library of questions and a template to make sure that the collected information is relevant.

One of the key benefits that Interactive is touting is the total integration of the module right from the outset. While other third-party applications need to be integrated into the workflow, Interactive Intelligence owns the call from the time it hits the ICP platform.

The solution features an intuitive Wizard like interface for each survey, which means less programming skills required to manage each survey, and much easier modifications on-the-fly.

Designed to enable proactive intervention with dissatisfied customers, the solution delivers immediate supervisor alerts, and managers can set alerts, based on certain responses or triggers.

The solution is expected to be released early next quarter, and will be available through the network of 300 Interactive Intelligence resellers.

Interactive Intelligence is also developing a speech analytics/emotion detection product designed to provide real-time alerts to contact center supervisors when heightened emotion is detected on a call.

Current speech analytics products do not deliver results in real time, and the delays introduced by the need to churn through the responses introduces unnecessary latency into the process.

The solution from Interactive Intelligence uses real-time speech analytics to determine emotion during the call, which is designed to help improve first call resolution and solve issues before they escalate beyond repair.

The solution, which will be able to distinguish between agent or customer emotions, also allows measurement of an agent’s performance on emotionally heightened calls.

There is no specific date set for the release of the speech analytics module.

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