Nexidia Launches ESI—Monitor and Agent Assist

Nexidia today introduced Nexidia ESI—Monitor, a solution that integrates into the company’s ESI—Capture and functions as part of its Enterprise Speech Intelligence (ESI) software suite. 

ESI—Monitor provides call centers access to real-time monitoring of customer/agent interactions and applies speech analytics during calls to improve productivity and customer service. Building on Nexidia’s phonetic indexing technology, call analysis is thus incorporated directly into the live call stream.

“[ESI—Monitor] allows you to build a series of queries, search terms, [and] key words that you’re listening for during those real-time conversations,” says Jeff Schlueter, vice president of marketing and business development at Nexidia. “And when those topics come up, [the solution] triggers some kind of event”—anything from driving information to the agent desktop to triggering an alert.

Nexidia also launched the first application to be built with ESI—Monitor, Agent Assist, which identifies topics spoken during customer service calls and automatically delivers related content to agents in real time.

Schlueter says Agent Assist can monitor customer service calls for topics with which agents may be less familiar—new services, new promotions, etc.—and, “when those topics come up during the conversation, bring that information to the agent desktop so they don’t have to go hunting and pecking for it.”

According to Schlueter, this sort of real time analytics is uncommon in the speech industry.  He explains that while companies offer other forms of real-time analytics, few if any offer a solution that can monitor freeform conversations in real time.

Schlueter says that although interactive voice response (IVR) systems interact with customers in real time, they analyze a smaller set of potential results or spoken commands.  ESI—Monitor and Agent Assist, he says, are different in that they are not limited to a structured IVR menu

“That type of analytics against free form data—real conversations going on in real time—is very new. I’m not familiar with anyone [else] that’s doing it,” Schlueter says. “We’re the first [company] to have a workable solution.”

In a beta deployment of Agent Assist, one telecom carrier documented a nearly eight percent reduction in average handle time and a two percent increase in sales revenue.

“When you combine increased efficiently with increased revenue, the overall [annualized] benefit to the company was over $2 million for just that one call center,” Schlueter says.