Abstract: 2011-2012 Speech Analytics Market Report

DMG Consulting’s sixth annual Speech Analytics Product and Market Report takes an in-depth look at these valuable solutions, which are seeing increasingly rapid adoption. The speech analytics market showed strong momentum in 2010 - 2011, with a wide variety of solutions from which to choose. The comprehensive 2011 - 2012 Speech Analytics Product and Market Report is designed to provide business and IT leaders with detailed functional and technical descriptions of available solutions, market share, best practices, pricing, benefits, and return on investment (ROI) data. This 372-page Report is a thorough guide to this flourishing technology segment. It frames the market, discusses trends and challenges, and helps users identify appropriate vendors and acquisition models to meet their current and future speech analytics needs.

Most organizations are aware of the benefits of analytics-oriented applications, which provide actionable insights into improving performance. As most companies struggle to do more with less, the focus remains on improving productivity and cutting costs while enhancing the customer experience. As a result of the current economic challenges, customer retention is also rapidly growing in importance as an enterprise goal.

With just 25 traceable speech analytics implementations in 2004, experts and pundits were skeptical about the viability of this emerging sector. Seven years later, it is clear that the speech analytics market is flourishing. Today, with 3,170 implementations, more companies than ever are realizing tremendous returns from speech analytics.  These compelling solutions are drawing the interest of business and IT leaders because of their ability to improve the customer experience while reducing costs.

In the midst of a challenged economy, when corporate and IT budgets are strained, this technology sector has shown continued growth. The number of implementations increased by 22% between 2009 and 2010, on top of growth rates in the prior three years of 39%, 50% and 106%, respectively. DMG’s research reveals several factors that have contributed to the success of the speech analytics segment:

• New vendors continue to enter the market
• Speech analytics functionality is being embedded into third-party applications
• Larger contact center competitors have started to buy speech analytics start-ups to fill a void in their portfolio
• Vendors are investing in making their solutions more functionally robust and easier to implement and utilize
• Speech processing times have decreased, and real-time speech analytics is now a reality
• The price of enterprise speech analytics implementations is decreasing
• Best practices have emerged to help end users realize the expected returns from speech analytics

The 2011 Speech Analytics Product and Market Report also identifies several factors that are driving the future growth of this key technology sector:

Customers Have Loud and Echoing Voices. Via the Internet and social media, customers have the power to broadcast their delights and disappointments in innumerable ways. Their ability to positively or negatively impact a company’s brand with a few keystrokes is becoming a weighty topic in boardrooms around the world. As a valuable complement to other solutions, speech analytics is a natural next step for enterprises that want to focus on improving their customer interactions. In this era of social media, speech analytics is giving enterprises much-needed access to the voice of the customer in an unprecedented, organized and systematic manner. By providing a historical and contextual analysis for service interactions, these solutions can help enterprises reconstruct the entire customer journey and evaluate the customer experience in a more detailed and relevant manner than ever before.

The Future is Real-Time. Today, contact centers use speech analytics mainly on a reactive basis, with recordings being analyzed overnight and manual changes taking place the following day. While this is sufficient for many businesses, it is cumbersome and time-consuming. An emerging group of real-time speech analytics solutions is enabling companies to set alerts, notifications and coaching prompts, and to provide feeds into other applications for automated outcomes. With real-time speech analytics, users will be able to judge the emotional state of the caller and determine if supervisor support is needed. DMG sees business and IT leaders inside and outside the contact center utilizing real-time intelligence from speech analytics solutions to re-define and enhance their service, sales and collections strategies to increase revenue and achieve a competitive advantage.

Tracking and Acting on Findings is Critical. There is great potential to make impactful changes based on the insights gleaned from speech analytics, but organizations still have work to do in this area. While some companies have a process in place for responding to findings, many are stuck on what they find rather than what to do next. 2010 was a breakthrough year in terms of awareness of the need for change management programs within organizations, to make speech analytics implementations more successful. This has had a positive impact on the quantifiable benefits associated with speech analytics and the perception of their ability to improve operations and customer satisfaction. However, DMG finds that for every company with a successful speech analytics initiative, there are twice as many that are not realizing the greatest possible return on investment.

DMG expects speech analytics to continue to pick up momentum with organizations across geographies and verticals, particularly as best practices emerge to help companies succeed with their implementations. More vendors will incorporate speech analytics within their solutions, and there will be continued focus on making findings more actionable.

Report Highlights

• Speech analytics is a strong and growing technology sector: With a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 124% between 2004 and 2010, DMG expects the speech analytics market to continue to expand over the next several years, growing by 42% in 2011, 32% in 2012, 25% in 2013, and 20% in 2014.

• Speech analytics can harness the voice of the customer: Organizations have a clear opportunity to leverage speech analytics to improve the customer experience. Speech analytics complements other applications to reconstruct the entire context of a customer’s experience, and provides systematic, actionable information that can be used to make impactful changes in customer service strategy.

• Real-time speech analytics is the future, and it’s coming on fast: Users will soon be able to use real-time analytics to improve agent performance and enhance the customer experience by sending alerts, notifications, and coaching prompts to agents while and interaction is in progress, as well as facilitating automated outcomes through feeds into other applications. In the near future, users will be able to use speech analytics to judge the emotional state of callers and garner supervisor support, as needed, to bring challenging interactions to a successful conclusion on the first try.

• It’s for the enterprise, too: Though speech analytics has traditionally been used in the contact center to reduce expenses, it offers strategic value across the entire enterprise. DMG provides a list of enterprise uses for speech analytics and best practices for implementing an enterprise strategy.

• Change management is key to speech analytics success: 2010 was a breakthrough year in introducing principles of change management that are necessary to improve the effectiveness of speech analytics implementations. This has yielded quantifiable benefits and has demonstrated speech analytics’ ability to improve operations and customer satisfaction. Users must continue to focus on taking appropriate action based on the valuable information gleaned from their speech analytics implementations, and vendors will continue to invest in making their findings more actionable for users.

Key Reasons to Buy this Report

• Definition of speech analytics, how it works, the associated building blocks and the underlying processing engines
• Overview of the state of the speech analytics market as these solutions transform from being perceived as high-risk investments to applications that are viable and highly beneficial for mainstream users
• Analysis of market trends and challenges faced by enterprises and speech analytics vendors
• Market share analysis, growth rates, contact center adoption rate, and four-year market projections for 2011 - 2014
• Company reports for 13 current and emerging speech analytics providers, with detailed functional and technical comparisons of the 7 leading solutions, including products, packages, and offerings for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs)
• Detailed review of the competitive landscape: speech analytics uses, contributions, ROI, emerging product innovation and future direction
• Best practices for successful speech analytics implementations, including how to make speech analytics actionable in order to realize quantifiable benefits
• Examination of how speech analytics is being used to drive enhancements in processes, workflows and applications outside of the contact center
• Analysis and review of emerging real-time speech analytics solutions and their ability to provide rapid insights and on-the-spot agent guidance
• Vendor satisfaction survey of the 7 leading speech analytics vendors
• Pricing for licensed, hosted and managed service offerings
• Speech Analytics Vendor Directory

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Order Information
To order a copy of the 2011-2012 Speech Analytics Product and Market Report, contact Deborah Navarra at 516-628-1098 or deborah.navarra@dmgconsult.com. You may also purchase the Report online at www.dmgconsult.com.

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