Envision Seeks Greater Reach For Speech Analytics

Earlier this week, Envision, a workforce optimization solutions provider, launched Envision InteractionIQ, a speech analytics product for call centers.

The solution is aimed at increasing the reach of speech analytics, which has historically had limited penetration into the call center market, according to the analytics firm Frost & Sullivan. The firm cites price, complexity, the need for resource investment, and a lack of immediate return on investment as hampering factors.

InteractionIQ attempts to mollify those concerns, primarily by reducing upfront costs to enterprises. Envision’s director of marketing, Jim Shulkin identifies four factors that make up the pricing models of speech analytics solutions:

• software;
• services;
• resulting hardware; and
• resources expenses associated with maintenance and support

Shulkin says the company has attacked all four factors in its new pricing model. Envision charges an agent licensing fee for software and charges for a processing license. Processing drives the majority of costs, Shulkin claims, so rather than charging a flat fee, his company developed a flexible plan that allows users to buy as much processing power as they need.

The plan allows users to focus and allocate their processing power through filters and to buy only the components and features vital to their business needs, rather than licensing a flat rate plan that will do more than is required.

A smaller company may not, for instance, need or have the funds to record its entire call volume. Envision could help the company determine where and how resources should be applied to suit business needs and provide immediate return on investment.

If those needs change, the filter can be reset.

Shulkin also says this scheme makes hardware costs more transparent. Often, vendors don't include estimates for associated hardware costs because they are assumed to be the client’s responsibility. By making the processing power required more explicit, Shulkin claims those costs are made very clear.

To further reduce costs, what Envision calls “extravagant” and “underutilized” “gadget features” found in other solutions have been stripped from InteractionIQ. The solution does away with bells and whistles, but gives users the power to do capturing, core speech processing, reporting, and analysis, as well as the ability to incorporate audio into optimization analytics.

“We didn’t include or disinclude anything that limits the product’s scalability,” Shulkin says. “The core applications, the ones you really need to run speech analytics in a hundred seat center or a thousand seat center, are there.”

This new pricing scheme may be the first step towards moving to a hosted model. For the time being the company is not seeing enough demand to justify pursuit.

“This market is just not as progressive as the [customer relationship management (CRM)] market yet. People just aren’t widely there yet,” says Shulkin.

He cites customer concerns over security and infrastructural problems like having to go through a client’s firewall to get recordings.

“It’s like the CRM market was 10 years ago,” he explains.

“We haven’t been asked for it, but I think that’s going to change. It’s going to go the way CRM went,” he adds.