During the last month, Envision has announced several enhancements in the new version of its suite of contact center performance management suite, Envision Centricity for optimizing agent workforces including support of native languages, tagging of data for analytics and the robustness of dashboards. These improvements build on the suite of products that began when Envision bought out its first call recording product to market in 1994. As I have tracked Envision over the last few years, the original recording product has been greatly improved and it has been joined with products that now record TDM and VoIP calls, capture what agents are doing at their desktop, schedule and manage agent workloads, monitor the performance of agents, manage agent training and coaching, produce reports and analysis (including in real-time), and a product to analyse the content on recorded calls.

In my view the key to success is that all these products are built on a homogenous platform and are tightly integrated together. Running a contact center is no easy task and center managers are under constant pressure to do more with less, which basically means having to handle more calls with the same number or fewer agents. This means coordinating activities as diverse as having the right number of skilled agents at their desk to handle varying volumes and patterns of calls, to supporting agents while they are handling these calls with the right systems and information. This requires managing lots of diverse activities which might be done well in isolation but optimal performance will only come as a result of taking an integrated approach. 

In this respect Envision is part of class of technology suppliers with applications that have brought together key applications with call recording, quality monitoring and speech analytics as part of the suite. It is part of a group of vendors that have similar integrated approaches that includes the big three – Aspect, Nice Systems and Verint – and a number of other vendors such as Interactive Intelligence, LiveOps and Voice Print International. Each of these has a slightly different set of applications and functionality but are basically targeting the same market. Envision has therefore worked hard to ensure that each of its components covers the key aspect of usability and capabilities, the suite is easy to install and use, and their pricing is competitive. I have pointed out the importance of agent performance to support the customer experience management processes which have to be taken seriously as the contact center is a key contributor to the increase or decrease of customer satisfaction.

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Regards,

Richard Snow - VP & Research Director