Atlanta Software Company Making Big Bucks Listening to Voices

Big Brother isn’t just watching. He’s listening, too.

Nexidia Inc., an Atlanta-based firm once known as Fast-Talk Communications which initially analyzed recorded conversations at warp speed to help the federal government spot potential terrorists, has become a national leader in the esoteric field of “speech analytics.”

The 10-year-old firm still works with federal agencies, but its bread and butter now is selling software that allows companies to analyze in a flash what thousands of people are saying when told their calls are being recorded “for quality and training purposes.”

The software identifies problems that cause unnecessarily long wait times, make callers mad or that lead people to hang up, all or any of which could result in Nexidia’s clients, which include Atlanta-based EarthLink, losing subscribers and money.

By analyzing so many calls so quickly, operators in call centers can focus on conversations that contain cues that help Nexidia’s clients determine whether customers are satisfied or frustrated.

Keith Dawson, an analyst with Frost & Sullivan, a New York-based research firm, says no company of any size can employ enough people to listen to individual calls and the software spots potential problems.

He says Nexidia’s software can scan recorded audio data two million times faster than the spoken word and spew out statistics about the efficiency of a client company’s call centers or even the performance of individual operators.

Kevin Brand, chief of consumer products and support for EarthLink, says Nexidia’s software provides “metrics” on such things as average hold times and calls kicked up to supervisors that the Internet service provider can use to solve problems, which can save money.

“We can use it to listen to selected recordings, spot problems and train agents,” he says. “If an agent is doing great, we can listen to his conversation and see what he’s doing right. Short calls raise red flags. So do long ones.”

Brand says Nexidia’s software “shows us areas where we need to improve. We can do searches for swear words. We have hundreds of agents and tens of thousands of calls a day. It’s helped us win awards for customer service.”

Jeff Schlueter, Nexidia’s vice president of marketing and business development, notes that call centers employ some 3.5 million people in North America and that ongoing training is critical to keep client customers happy.

EarthLink has identified hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings by reducing average hold times and achieved a 10 percent reduction in monthly quality control expenses.

Schlueter says its software uses “phonemes” — small portions of human speech such as “ah” — to track how customer service agents are doing and use what they find to make them more efficient.

Another client, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, says Nexidia’s software has helped it reduce average hold times by 42 percent, call volume by 12 percent and improve self-service options.

Another client, the British outsourcing company Ventura, says it has seen a 42-second reduction in its bill-paying process and drastically decreased customer complaints.

Nexidia presents the information to clients in the form of charts and graphs.

“Without actually listening to calls, we can find clues by analyzing speech that identify problems,” Schlueter says.

In addition, he says, “You can set up a system so that it will automatically recognize when a customer has had a bad experience.”

The best call centers are those whose agents keep waiting times down and as well as requests to speak to supervisors. Schlueter says the software also can detect other signs of frustration or variations in sales scripts that could make it harder for salesmen to close deals and pinpoint those who need training.

He says Nexidia has 250-plus client companies, mostly in North America.

“We can offer information on when callers call, what the problem is, help fix it with training,” he says. “A client can save $2 million by reducing call handle time by about 8 percent.”

At present, Nexidia has no plans to go public, but that’s a possibility down the road, Schlueter says. So far, Nexidia and its 100 employees have been operating on millions of dollars put up by venture capitalists such as Atlanta-based HIG Capital Ventures, which hope to cash in if the company goes public.