New Call Center App Connects Data, Agents

A new product fromeTalk, Qfiniti Assist, provides contact center agents with knowledge management support while they are on the line with a customer. The tool combines speech recognition and enterprise search technology to identify the information the agent needs in order to answer a client’s question. It then automatically routes that information to the agent’s desktop during the call.

The system’s response time is between five to seven seconds, said Roger Woolley, senior vice president of marketing. “That was the development that liberated this product for release,” he told CRM Buyer.

Had the response time been 10 to 20 seconds, for example, the information would not have been useful to the agent fielding questions from the customer, he explained. “We wanted to bring it as close to real time as possible.”

The product reduces handle times for agents by 30 percent, Woolley said.

How It Works

Qfiniti Assist embeds Autonomy’s search technology in eTalk’s voice processing software; Autonomy acquired eTalk last year.

During a typical conversation with a customer, a rep might have to field several separate questions. With the Qfiniti Assist system, the agent can simply press a button when the customer mentions key terms, triggering pop-up screens with information pertinent to those topics. Hyperlinks are included in the returned data leading to additional information that the agent might find useful to assist the customer.

The product has the potential to dramatically increase first call resolution, noted Rhonda Chatman, quality assurance manager at PFSWeb, a supply chain and contact center outsourcer that uses eTalk’s Qfiniti suite.

It is also well suited for unusual queries that would require the rep to put the customer on hold in order to research the proper response, Woolley added. He referred to the time he called an airline to get more information about flying with a pet. The rep put him on hold for seven minutes. As he waited, Woolley found the information on the airline’s Web site.

The product can also be used for textual or written inquiries as well, he noted.

System Agnostic

A module within Qfiniti Enterprise, Qfiniti is system agnostic — that is, it can work with any contactcenter or CRM application. “It is a small application that sits on the desktop andallows the agent to do quick query searches,” said Woolley. It only retrieves the most recent information available, headded.

This is the company’s second product release since eTalk’s acquisition by Autonomy. The first release, Qfiniti Explore, is a back-end analytical application, able to process a large volume of client calls and then analyze the content according to category.