Eureka! CallMiner Hopes Large Enterprises Discover Its New Release

Speech analytics can provide a valuable service for customer service departments: It's not enough to know that a customer is happy or upset, satisfied or dissatisfied. Analytics can take these conversations and determine exactly why a customer reacted the way she did, or exactly what pleased her or ticked her off. There have been questions as to just how scalable speech analytics solutions can be to reach larger enterprises. Fort Myers, Fla.-based CallMiner is looking to change that with its sixth-generation speech analytics solution, CallMiner Eureka.

According to Jeff Gallino, CallMiner's cofounder and chief technology officer, the latest edition is primarily focused on delivering results for large-scale implementations—in other words, enterprise-level deployments. "Basically, this release of Eureka is about proven scalability, independence both technical and vendor[-related], and,through that, creating kind of a future-proof analytics layer," he says. Noting the company's two recent customer announcements, Daimler Financial Services Americas and Evanston Northwestern Healthcare, Gallino says he's confident the latest version of Eureka will analyze, synthesize, and deliver. "This isn't a future release of a product," he says. "This is a product we've installed and been running with these customers this year, and we're just now telling the rest of the world about it.

Eureka is now split into two separate layers, a platform layer and a presentation layer. At the same time, Gallino says, the presentation layer has itself been split in two: a large-scale Web-report-and-search delivery system, and a heavy client-analyst workbench. New platform enhancements include:

• the ability to integrate multiple, heterogeneous sites regardless of recorder type, version, vendor, or location;
• data encryption to secure audio while stored on disk; and
• fully functional multitenancy for data separation across business units or clients.

Of these platform enhancements, Gallino boasts that supporting fully functional multitenancy is a strong competitive differentiator. While executives may want to have one single analytics layer to get a comprehensive view, different lines of business may want their own layer. Multitenancy can provide the best of both worlds, he says. "With multitenancy, people do not have to constantly switch between systems to look at different results," he says. "[This feature] is not very common in the contact center space."

Beyond the platform, new user-facing features in the latest version of Eureka include:

• solution packages delivering business objectives such as agent lifecycle management, improving customer satisfaction, and first-call resolution;
• the ability to customize user-by-user call categorizations; and
• Web-enabled browser access to Eureka Search and Eureka Report. 

Of these, enabling users to customize call categories to analyze and measure stands out most to Gallino. "This is a big differentiator for us," he declares. "With this release, the power to modify, add, and delete from the [categories CallMiner can measure] is now in the customer's hands."

The release (and the new customer announcements) underscore a move byCallMiner to reach out beyond small and mid-size businesses, and toestablish a footprint with larger enterprises. That first step may bedifficult to take, according to Gareth Herschel, research director atGartner.

Herschel suggests that before potential buyers are convinced that speech analytics solutions are both scalable and legitimate for larger enterprises, they'll want to see some proven implementations in place elsewhere. "In helping customers plot solutions and strategies for CRM, business intelligence, and call center [agent quality management], we're always asked whether we believe speech analytics is real and whether it has scalability," he writes. "To meet the standard of 'enterprise proven,' Gartner believes speech analytics solution providers should have large, global implementations with out-of-the-box functionality to support business analysts and the needs of senior executives."