Ventura Wins Contact Centre Innovation Award For Pioneering Use Of Speech AnalyticsProfessional Planning Forum Recognizes Ventura for Demonstrating Benefits of Speech Technology to Enhance Quality & Performance Management
LONDON, UK- April 28, 2010 –Nexidia, the market-leading provider of audio search and speech analytics solutions, is pleased to announce that Ventura, a leading contact centre outsourcer in the UK and one of Nexidia’s flagship customers, has won a prestigious Contact Centre Innovation Award for pioneering the use of speech analytics in its operations. The award recognises Ventura’s innovative use of speech analytics to focus performance coaching on key areas the company has identified for improvement. It highlights the fact that by using Nexidia speech analytics, Ventura has reduced Average Handle Time (AHT) by twenty-five seconds, cut silent time by six percent, reduced repeat calls by ten percent in four months for one of their clients, and saved over £1.3m in annual operations costs.
Presented by the Professional Planning Forum at the Customer Contact Planning conference gala dinner on 20th April, the innovation awards celebrate the achievements of the industry’s innovators and offer a benchmark of excellence within the industry.
“Call centre coaching has followed the same pattern for many years,” explained Paul Smedley, Executive Director of the Professional Planning Forum. “Speech analytics offers a chance to radically change this to focus on the customers’ experience in much more detail. There are very few companies making this happen and every contact centre can learn a lot from the way Ventura have applied this pioneering technology and the results they have achieved.”
Smedley adds: “Whilst small sample call monitoring and generic coaching was best practice 10 years ago, today’s speech analytics technology can provide a complete view of all calls and allow us to accurately understand the customer experience. Being able to focus on specific issues and use the voice of the customer is really impactful on agent coaching. Speech analytics has an important part to play in moving quality and performance management to the next level by enabling us to put the customer at the heart of how we do business.”
Ventura use speech analytics to extract business intelligence from call recordings and uncover inefficiencies such as increased AHT, silent time, or factors driving repeat calls. Analysing 750,000 calls every month across a range of clients, the company transforms this intelligence into focused coaching and training needs for individual customer service advisors (CSAs), and also uses it to re-engineer more efficient call processes. By applying intelligence gathered from such a large base of recordings, Ventura’s speech analytics implementation saves them more than £1.3m in annual operating costs, which are economic returns that could never be realized by using a traditional quality management approach.
“The beauty of implementing a speech analytics platform is that it gives you a completely objective view on the call,” commented Andy McKenzie, Head of IT for Ventura. “It makes a real difference to coaching as a team leader.”
“You can go straight to the part of the call that needs work and coach around that area,” added David Pearson, Ventura’s Team Leader and Quality Manager.
Ventura utilise the Nexidia Enterprise Speech Intelligence (ESI) solution, supplied in conjunction with Nexidia’s partner, Business Systems UK Ltd. Speech analytics is currently operational across five Ventura clients, with further implementations planned. “We are delighted with the Ventura win,” adds Jonathan Wax, VP EMEA at Nexidia. “They have proven that speech analytics can help contact centre operators realize a wide range of business benefits and support diverse operational needs across many industries. They have put in substantial commitment to this project and as a result have achieved the recognition they rightly deserve.” Ventura clients currently utilising the speech analytics capability include customers in the utilities, mobile telecoms, media, and automotive industries. The company will also be hosting an open day for Planning Forum members on 10th June to showcase their use of speech analytics.
About Nexidia
Nexidia is the audio and video search company with patented technologies and breakthrough applications that enable customers to quickly gain new insight, build competitive advantage and realise the amazing possibilities now discoverable in audio and video content from contact centres, media outlets, government intelligence and legal discovery. For more information, please visit http://www.nexidia.com.
About Ventura
Ventura has grown over the last 40 years to become one of the UK’s leading outsourcers. With blue chip and government partners, including O2, Orange, Sky, BMI, RBS and DWP, Ventura employs over 8,000 people in its 8 sites in the UK and offshore, all dedicated to making a difference to its client operations. Delivering a breadth of cost effective, flexible and efficient outsourcing solutions Ventura provides the service, expertise and business excellence that customers demand. For more information, please visit www.ventura.co.uk.
About Professional Planning Forum
The Professional Planning Forum exists as an independent industry body, to promote best practice and professionalism in contact centre planning. Offering research, advice, accreditation, training and member support, the Forum helps every contact centre develop the confident skilled analysts that are key to improvement. As the independent industry body promoting effective resourcing and planning the Forum are supplier¬-independent and work across all industry sectors to provide specialist support for contact centre professionals. For more information please contact: www.planningforum.co.uk.