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The largest volume of data generated in a call center is found, naturally, in calls. But centers have made very little use of this prime source of information because extracting and analyzing the data has been so difficult and time-consuming. Recent research completed by Ventana Research showed that 62 percent of call centers have deployed technology to record a sample of calls. The main use of these recordings has been by a supervisor listening to a small subset of the recordings – themselves a small subset of all the calls – typically for the purpose of monitoring the quality of agents’ performance. The rest are discarded.

There is technology available today that changes all this. Call-recording techniques have improved to the extent that it is now possible to record all calls. Vendors such as Envision, Nice Systems, Verint and Witness have techniques for analyzing unstructured data that automatically extract information from all recorded calls. These techniques make it possible to spot words or phrases, put the content into the context of the whole call and identify changes in the voices’ pitch and tone. They can be applied to both the caller and agent sides of the conversation, making it possible to use the calls for far more than just agent quality monitoring. Applied across multiple calls from a caller, or multiple calls handled by an agent, they can help spot trends, understand root causes of calls, identify training needs and even segment customers into more granular groups. These advances can help managers make better-informed decisions on how to improve the handling of subsequent calls.