October 2004

TMC Labs Innovation Awards Part II  (continued)

(previous)

NICE Systems
NiceUniverse
www.nice.com

NICE Systems is well known for its recording and monitoring solutions. But what if you could take recording and monitoring to the next level, where the system could automatically detect specific key words or key phrases and highlight those calls? Or what if you could detect emotion in calls to find angry customers? Using voice analysis to detect emotion sounds like something from a futuristic Star Trek episode, but NICE Systems' NiceUniverse does indeed have this feature and more.

It can use speech analytics tools to spot key words or phrases, and it can use emotion detection to find conversations with heightened voice pitch representing angry customers who may defect. Visualization tools then present trends and root-cause analysis for business improvement. We should mention that NiceUniverse is architected around .NET.

NICE states that it is the first to unify recording, quality monitoring, coaching, customer feedback, enterprise reports, analytics and centralized storage, all in a single platform viewable through a customizable portal. The real innovation, other than the emotion detection, is that NICE has included analysis tools that allow the enterprise to extract information and value from the treasure trove of recordings that were previously untapped, now applying business analytics to them.

Nuance Communications, Inc.
Nuance Caller
Authentication 1.0
www.nuance.com

How many times have you given your mother's maiden name as a password? How many databases in the world have your mother's maiden name in them? In addition to the password being shared with many databases, how hard do you think it would be to look up that information with the Internet? Identity theft is certainly on the rise. Identity theft and fraud affect nearly 10 million people and cost businesses upwards of $60 billion per year (source: Federal Trade Commission). Simply giving your mother's maiden name is no longer a guarantee of privacy or identity-theft protection. It also opens up companies to potential liability if they inaccurately authenticate someone.

Now, with Nuance's Caller Authentica-tion 1.0, you can authenticate simply with your voice. The product is powered by Nuance's voice authentication engine, Nuance Verifier, and uses voiceprint technology to secure access to specific information. Before transactions are authorized, users' spoken voiceprints are compared to those previously enrolled and on file. Only when an exact match is achieved can the transaction be performed. Users simply speak a set of digits ' rather than entering a difficult-to-remember PIN ' and are authenticated based on the unique characteristics of their voices.
Nuance Caller Authentication allows companies with call centers that handle millions of calls per year to save millions of dollars (and thousands of man-hours) by automating caller verification. Using computers to perform the authentication saves on labor costs in addition to providing a more secure authentication method than just relying on mother's maiden name or Social Security number. Nuance Caller Authentication acts as a secure 'front door' to call center systems, verifying the identity of callers within a variety of scenarios: customer care (address change, order status), transactions (bill-pay applications, claims processing, trading), productivity (field service automation, sales force automation) and communication (e-mail reading). Nuance Caller Authentication (NCA) is relevant to several vertical markets, including financial services, healthcare, telecommunications, utilities and retail. While we certainly don't see the 'what is your mother's maiden name?' method going away anytime soon, using innovative speech technology and applying it to thwart identify theft is a step in the proper direction.

Raindance Communications
Raindance Meeting
Edition
www.raindance.com

Raindance Meeting Edition is an integrated conferencing solution that enhances traditional audio conferences by allowing participants to see (IP video), hear (IP and PSTN audio) and collaborate on documents in real-time. Participants are able to meet from their computers to share applications, present PowerPoint slides or create virtual whiteboards ' all while watching and listening to other individuals as they would in a face-to-face meeting.

Raindance is unique in that it has combined audio, Web and video into one seamless offering. In addition to the multipoint video that scales up to 125 people, the product provides tight Outlook integration. According to Raindance, in 20 seconds or less, users can join meetings on the phone and the Web through a desktop icon or simple one-click access through e-mail invitations. For advanced scheduling, Raindance's integration with Outlook allows any Outlook meeting to become a Raindance meeting with a single mouse click.

With Raindance's OpenGo audio conferencing, users are automatically called by Raindance's automated attendant, eliminating the need to remember dial-in numbers, I.D.s and PINs. Once in a meeting, users can perform onscreen annotation, such as highlighting, circling, writing or drawing arrows, to emphasize specific elements of an application, browser or document.

Raindance has a unique 'follow-talker' feature to track the current speaker in the video pane or select individual participants to view their video feed. The video will automatically switch to the speaker because the integrated audio will recognize the audio stream has been activated.

Raindance optimizes both application and browser-sharing with respect to each participant's bandwidth. A meeting toolbar lets the user manage what application is being shared, as well as access participant management features. One final interesting feature is that arriving late to a Raindance meeting is not a problem ' you can use a private window to view the meeting history and catch up without disrupting the meeting in progress.
 

RightNow Technologies, Inc.
RightNow Service
www.rightnow.com

RightNow Technologies offers its RightNow Service solution through a multi-tenant, hosted on-demand model. RightNow coined the term 'self-learning knowledge base' and has several patents to back it up. This knowledge base serves as not only a self-service mechanism for customers searching for answers on the Web, it also serves as a means for the customer service representatives (CSRs) to provide accurate, consistent answers to customers via Web, e-mail, chat or phone.

Two other innovative technologies include SmartAssistant and SmartSense.
SmartAssistant is effective for instances when customers don't bother to search the Web self-service knowledge base and simply submit an e-mail inquiry. SmartAssistant will intelligently parse the words in the e-mail and automatically push the most relevant content from the knowledge base to the customer. If those answers still don't prove helpful, the customer is then allowed to submit the e-mail question. Similarly, CSRs assisting customers via e-mail can click on the same feature (called 'suggested answers') from their desktop application to ensure accuracy of the answers and save time.

SmartSense is a unique feature. It is used within the RightNow Service agent console to display a color-coded 'sense' that indicates the mood of the incoming e-mail and outgoing e-mail communications. For example, the system can be configured so that an angry customer's e-mail can be automatically escalated to the service manager or be pushed to the top of the queue list.
RightNow states that it is the first to introduce the concept of 'Proactive Customer Service.' RightNow Service extends its contact center functionality to include outbound e-mail communication. This new module, called RightNow Outbound, enables customer service managers to anticipate customer service needs and send targeted service-related messages to the affected customer base to preempt incoming inquiries.

RightNow can import third-party applications (e.g., billing/accounting systems, order tracking/status systems, supply chain/RMA systems) directly into the RightNow Service agent desktop screen. RightNow Service can also be integrated with a variety of phone switches and IVR (interactive voice response) systems, sales force automation, marketing automation and data warehouse and workforce management applications.

One feature that caught our attention is the product's ability to use both implicit and explicit methods to rank answers to a submitted question based on their helpfulness. For example, when a knowledge base answer is viewed by a user, the answer's rating increases. If the user continues his or her search after viewing the answer, its rating decreases. Users can also provide direct input as to how helpful the answer was by clicking on the buttons provided below each answer (on a 0-100 percent satisfaction scale). It uses time-based ranking of knowledge item relevancy, which helps ensure that the first topics the users see when they come to the knowledge base are those that are currently of the greatest interest. Considering that many users are often too busy to provide feedback on whether something did or did not solve their problem, we commend RightNow for designing an intelligent method of automatically analyzing customers' self-service requests and determining the best answers for any future similar help request.
 

Rockwell FirstPoint Contact
FirstPoint Enterprise product leveraging Cisco CallManager
www.rockwellfirstpoint.com or www.concerto.com 
(Concerto recently purchased
Rockwell FirstPoint Contact.)

FirstPoint Enterprise leveraging Cisco CallManager is a great solution for enterprise-level contact centers, as it brings traditional TDM functionality, such as CTI, screen pops and contact center applications (including skills-based routing, queuing and reporting), to the VoIP world. Companies can have the full-featured functionality on an IP infrastructure that until now could only be found on a time-division multiplexing (TDM) infrastructure.

FirstPoint Enterprise utilizes Cisco CallManager IP-PBX for basic telephony functionality and extends the capabilities with the same product features that are in the TDM version of FirstPoint Enterprise. In this configuration, FirstPoint Enterprise uses a Rockwell FirstPoint Contact media server and softswitch application to integrate directly with Cisco CallManager through a JTAPI interface.

The FirstPoint Enterprise product leveraging Cisco CallManager provides several advanced features:

' Conferencing. All three- and four-party conferences are pulled back into the FirstPoint media server to allow greater flexibility.
' Monitor/barge-in. A critical contact center function that is delivered utilizing the media server component, supervisors have the ability to silent-monitor agents either when on a single call or on a conference call. They then have the ability to 'barge-in' as needed and become full participants in the call.
' Personal announcements. Using the media server component to establish calls at the initial routing point, the solution allows application-specific personal greetings to be delivered to agents and callers at the time the call is delivered.
' Context-sensitive music on hold. When an agent puts a call on hold, the call is pulled back into the media server for treatment, instead of playing the Cisco CallManager music source. This allows callers to hear application-specific music or advertisements while they are on hold. Music sources can be external devices or prerecorded WAV files stored on the media server itself.

Another innovative feature is a 'Queue Optimizer' that gives callers the option to receive a callback when an agent is available or at a caller-specified time, without losing place in queue. This solution is unique in that it takes what Rockwell FirstPoint Contact does best ' routing, reporting and queuing capabilities ' and combines those capabilities with what Cisco does best ' a scalable, reliable VoIP platform.
 

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