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CallFinder Executive Interview

Jay Rosenblatt, Chief Executive Officer, Speech Analytics, CallFinder


What competitive benefits can small and medium sized businesses derive by deploying affordable speech analytics technology?

Businesses are competing more and more on the quality of service they provide in the “customer experience,” which is expected to overtake price and product as the key competitive differentiator in 2020. This creates a need for small to medium-sized businesses to identify what sets them apart and leverage any possible advantages in this crucial area.

For our customers, this comes in several shapes: 

  1. Improving efficiency in the contact center for more satisfied customers
  2. Increasing productivity without increasing the number of agent seats or size of the QA team
  3. Assessing agent performance with unbiased evaluations to use as training examples
  4. Reducing costly agent churn by fostering happy agent, productive agent teams 

In our 30 years of experience with thousands of clients in the SMB space, we’ve learned the challenges they face in recording agent-customer interactions, most notably a lack of internal resources to listen to and manually evaluate these conversations. This limits their ability to uncover and effectively apply the insights contained in customer interactions to improve contact center performance. To level the playing field for organizations without the bandwidth to review a high volume of calls or an in-house analytics expert, we developed an affordable SaaS analytics offering targeted at SMBs and contact centers. 

Our clients look to us to resolve the issues involved monitoring agent-customer interactions for quality assurance, script compliance, risk mitigation, identifying agent coaching opportunities, and evaluating of the customer experience they’re delivering. CallFinder not only empowers businesses to automatically score agent-customer interactions, but mine calls for high-level business and customer insights that only analyzing a large sample of recorded conversations can deliver.

Our solution combines the company’s deep experience with tracking and reporting analytics with a simple user interface, ultimately providing automated transcription, analysis, scoring and reporting of agent-customer interactions. Clients can easily extract value and business insights, monitor customer interactions for quality assurance, and measure script compliance from recorded conversations within seconds. They can then take the knowledge they’ve gained to make adjustments to their call handling processes, allowing for the faster handle times that callers are seeking

One client uses our solution to help modify agent scripts to help increased sales and revenue opportunities by identifying the exact point in a script a conversation segues to a sale--or not. They’ve leveraged this capability to revise their scripts, and agent training procedure to move conversations down the sale path and are reaping the bottom line benefit of improved performance.

Why is it so important for call centers to have the capability to efficiently monitor incoming calls?

It eliminates the need for businesses to manually score what winds up being insignificantly small samples of calls. Instead, businesses can take advantage of definitive, actionable reports to drive higher levels of efficiency and profitability. The economics of manual call scoring do not provide the critical data required to navigate what customers are saying and how their agents are responding. For example, we have clients that are now able to monitor and score 100% of their agent-customer interactions, up from in some cases as little as 2%, or 10-15%, and they’re doing that with the same size QA department. The insights they receive through automated call scoring and reporting provides managers with the data to conduct focused and accurate coaching sessions, to improve agent performance at faster. More often than not, managers can coach agents’ weaknesses during the critical first 90 days of a new agent’s tenure to reduce agent attrition. 

Additionally, business insights captured and reported on in the call, agent, and team scorecards, provide clients with a reliable picture of how their team is actually performing in near real-time providing the metrics necessary to rapidly improve call outcomes.

How can organizations improve the quality of each individual interaction by unlocking unstructured data from daily conversations?

Our solution automatically reports on agent performance and customer experience through automated call, agent, and team scorecards. It also includes a speech-to-text transcription feature, which has a search component, so users can perform ad-hoc searches to uncover keywords and phrases within customer interactions.

This combination of scorecards and transcripts means users can access a high-level overview of contact center performance across teams, by specific agent, and even by individual call if necessary. This data is accessible through customized reports that can be exported and automatically shared across departments and internal stakeholders, including executive management teams who may want a bird’s eye view into the operations and performance of the contact center.

CallFinder clients use the scorecard evaluations of individual agents and interactions to better train low-performing agents by leveraging the strategies and compliance rates of their higher-performing counterparts.

In what ways can companies utilize business intelligence to reduce costs, improve agent performance and deliver a consistently superior customer experience?

Accessing intelligence within agent-customer interactions gives businesses the data and coaching opportunities to make changes to contact center processes that ultimately result in greater productivity and efficiency not only in the department but the entire organization. The unbiased insights delivered via automated scorecards enable them to evaluate agent performance and key performance metrics to impart improved training and coaching efforts to achieve optimal performance. Leveraging these insights gives companies the wherewithal to transform what has traditionally been a cost center to a revenue-generating operation.

Our client base of SMB businesses across a spectrum of industries report they’re experiencing: 

  • Up to 14% reduction in call handle times, resulting in higher productivity rates
  • 100% visibility into customer interactions, up in some cases from just 2%
  • Increasing the number of calls reviewed for quality and compliance to 100%, up from 10-15%.
  • Improving FCR processes and rates for greater impact on revenue
  • Identifying top customer call reasons 

Can you briefly discuss the available delivery options, data security and compliance provisions of your solution?

There are several ways that we can receive audio files. Most commonly, clients send their recordings and metadata to CallFinder for processing, and then access their call searches, agent-customer analytics, and call reports through our interface. We can process virtually any call recording format, and they can choose to send calls as they happen, or in batches.

CallFinder is also a fully licensed telecom carrier through our relationship with 800 Response Marketing, LLC. We can carry call traffic and route calls to any phone number (toll-free or local). Our network will record 100% of the inbound call traffic, and process audio though our platform. When we carry client call traffic, the platform records and analyzes calls in near real-time. The process is smooth, fast, and the services are more cost-effective, since it eliminates the need for a third-party call recording vendor. 

We take the security and protection of data seriously. CallFinder houses a business’s information within a secure SOC/SSAE16-accredited Equinix data center and adds further application and user-level protections.

What intrinsic advantages make CallFinder a leading provider of speech analytics technology?

Based on years of experience and extensive customer feedback, CallFinder has taken advantage of leading speech analytics technologies to deliver a solution that optimizes performance, functionality, and user experience without compromise.

While the CallFinder solution and interface provides easy access to call data through a user-friendly platform, we recognize that not all businesses employ business and data analysts to keep tabs on the health of key business metrics like agent performance. This is why we developed our comprehensive MyAnalyst Client Support services, which provides clients with a managed solution. We understand that business plans change: new agents come on board, new phrases are identified, scripts are modified, and business goals and needs change. 

Our robust support program and team of speech analytics specialists is unmatched and one of the many elements that make working with us such an intelligent choice. Our analysts essentially become members of our client’s staff, assuring their investment in analytics delivers better business results. Our managed service starts by working with clients throughout the implementation process:  a dedicated analyst supports each client through developing the scope of the engagement based on client needs, and then continues with the project through business discovery, search and scorecard creation, refinement, and extensive training of internal stakeholders. This process ensures that every client is sufficiently prepared to create scorecards and reports on their own after implementation. However, the MyAnalyst Client Support team is always available to them, using allotted monthly MyAnalyst support hours for assistance in building new search phrases, searches, and scorecard reports. In addition, clients can count on the Analyst team for additional user training.

Join us on the upcoming Technology Showcase webcast, Gain Visibility Into Customer Interactions With The Combined Power of Automated Scorecards, Transcription and Sentiment Analysis on August 13th at 1pm ET to get an inside look at the engine that drives our platform.

  Register today.