Forensic Call Search Service Launches

Io Speech Analytics, a call center consultancy based in the United Kingdom, yesterday launched iocallfinder, a new forensic call search service for contact centers.

Making use of phonetic speech technology from Nexidia—which breaks down words into individual sounds—iocallfinder recognizes and indexes recorded conversations, thus allowing for call categorization and forensic searching based on spoken content.

“It’s very, very easy to turn this [into a] forensic tool where you’re searching for particular names, particular words or key phrases within a call, or more importantly within a large volume of calls,” says Neil Barnes, director of consulting services at Io Speech Analytics.

According to Barnes, iocallfinder “can process literally hundreds of hours of calls, even thousands of hours of calls, within a matter of hours…and then search them, when that processing is finished, in a matter of minutes.”

Traditionally, locating a specific call or calls—via information about call dates, agent ID, and telephone extension—has been an arduous and time consuming process, often based on vague, incomplete or even unavailable information, Barnes says.

“It’s slow,” he notes. “It’s resource-hungry. And if you outsource it to somebody to transcribe, it can be very, very expensive.”

But, with iocallfinder—a service that requires no hardware, software or infrastructure investment and works with any proprietary call recording platform—call center managers can find specific calls within thousands of recorded conversations easily and quickly.

“The whole idea is that legal firms or banks traditionally have to have somebody listen to all these calls and maybe even transcribe them all to make them searchable,” Barnes says. “What we’re doing is…taking out 90 percent of the irrelevant calls and presenting them with a more manageable volume and ultimately…we can spend time drilling down and finding the calls that are of particular relevance.”

In addition to identifying and tagging relevant calls, iocallfinder also rates call relevancy and even highlights portions of specific calls in which key words, names or phrases occur.

“We can look not only where within the calls those particular phrases occur, but…you can identify them, focus in, and listen to just those bits if necessary,” says Barnes, who notes that iocallfinder can also be used to measure customer satisfaction and compliance via call monitoring.

Barnes says there has already been significant buzz surrounding the new offering, which only went live this week: “It seems to have sparked a great deal of interest.”