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Evaluating call center software vendors with real-time analytics tools

Evaluating call center software vendors with real-time analytics tools

By  Donna Fluss, President, DMG Consulting LLC

SearchCRM.com

What's your opinion about Siebel or SAP for real-time analytics? Which is a better analytics software? Are these the best call center software vendors for this area of analytics, or are there other vendors you can add to the list?
This depends on your definition of real-time analytics and where and how you plan to use the application. Today, real-time analytics describes a rather broad category of call center applications that generally function in near-real time, not actual real time. Many applications from call center software vendors large and small provide near-real-time analytics. For example, most call center speech analytics applications provide data on a next-day basis, but fall into the real-time analytics category. Speech analytics products are available from stand-alone vendors like CallMiner, Nexidia and UTOPY, Inc.. They are also available from QM/recording (also known as workforce optimization) vendors – like etalk, iSense, NICE Systems, Verint Systems Inc., VirtualLogger, VPI ( Voice Print International, Inc.) and Witness Systems, Inc.. SER Solutions, Inc. also provides a speech analytics solution. iSense provides analytics on a real-time basis.

For more traditional analytics, where Siebel/Oracle and SAP come into play, there are many other applications. Oracle purchased a vendor called Sigma Dynamics in 2006 that had an application that was able to provide information in real time. It was designed by a number of the same people who built Epiphany's real-time analytics product. There are also real-time analytics products from smaller companies, such as Island Data Corporation. This product does an excellent job of finding the meaning in unstructured inputs from free-form surveys, newsfeeds, blogs, etc.

I suggest that you take a look at my recently-released book, The Real-Time Contact Center. There is a free chapter download available on SearchCRM.com, or you can buy the entire text on Amazon.com. Chapter 9, called "Real-Time Analytics," provides a great deal of information about this market and the call center software vendors who offer these applications.

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