Evaluating call center software vendors with real-time analytics tools

Evaluating call center software vendors with real-time analytics tools

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?

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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.

This was first published in January 2007