Speech Recognition: Getting It Right

With ever-mounting pressure on customer service, customer experience and digital transformation executives to deliver self-service and automation strategies, some providers claim to have a “magic box” solution with AI and machine learning-fueled chatbot technologies. But, in reality, building an intelligent assistance strategy is not always so simple.

In this webinar, Opus Research and representatives from CX Company, will demystify what AI and machine learning means for your organization and identify key steps in building an intelligent assistance strategy to deliver cost savings and a better customer experience.

In a recent survey commissioned by Uniphore, Opus Research asked 500 influential executives in the contact center and customer experience domain about the perceived value of Speech Analytics and to ascertain the impact on plans to procure and deploy such resources in the future.

With completed interviews of decision-makers (Director, VP, C-level) from firms with revenue of more than U.S. $50 million, the survey respondents included a mix of vertical industries, including: telecommunications, healthcare, financial services, retail, pharmaceuticals, travel & tourism, and commercial banking.

Join Dan Miller, lead analyst & founder at Opus Research, and Derek Top, director of research with Opus Research, as they unveil the key findings from this exclusive executive survey on speech analytics:

* Implementation of speech analytics is poised for growth: New, real-time applications create better customer experience
* Findings attest to maturity of technologies, applications and options: Support of multi-channel support strategies
* Mix of premises, cloud and “hybrid” architectures
* Respondents see a bright future: Most expect to increase spending and investment & finding means to build a business case

As digital, mobile commerce crescendos, Identity and Access Management (IAM) techniques are key to providing a consistent, individualized experience, regardless of the device used or communications channel employed. Providing secure access from a trusted device was hard enough. Now customers control their device-of-choice, channel-of-choice and time-of-choice. It is important to develop and employ technologies that make authentication friction-free and pleasant.

Join Dan Miller, lead analyst at Opus Research, and Brandon Whichard, from IBM Security, as they provide “Five Concrete Steps” toward keeping each customer happy. Opus Research has coined the term “Intelligent Authentication” (IAuth) to describe simple, secure and seamless ways to authenticate individuals and support digital commerce.

More than 8 out of 10 customers are moving from one channel to another to complete a transaction or get an issue resolved. And, on average, they use more than 4 different “channels” over the course of their respective journeys. Despite this, customers expect consistent answers and personalized service regardless of their channel preference, device of choice and time of day.

Join Dan Miller, Lead Analyst at Opus Research, and Daniel Hong, Sr. Director of Product Marketing and Strategy at [24]7 as they review these recent findings and their impact your self-service and assisted service strategies via text, chat, Web forms or phone calls. Dan will bring context from a recent study of Enterprise Intelligent Assistants (EIAs), culminating in the “8 Attributes of Successful EIAs”. Daniel will review primary research findings addressing both practices and preferences of customers in a digital, omnichannel world. The webinar will also include a case study.

Attend this webinar to refine your company’s digital customer experience to keep your customers in charge, even when it’s a classic self-service situation, including:

The Eight Characteristics of Highly Effective Intelligent Assistants
How a Smart UI supports a delightful UX
Making your investment in CRM, Analytics and Knowledge Management support AI

FinUno will present how an Intelligent Assistant can help users buy and sell investment products, follow market moves and manage their investment transactions in real-time simply by asking. Through its intuitive interface, the fin1™ platform acts both as a self-servicing tool and as a collaboration platform with financial advisors.

No longer are voice biometrics tentatively tested in single channels and measured against purely theoretical equal error rates. In reality, businesses are implementing high performance solutions that easily scale, yet deliver a consistently low friction user experience and strong security across a business.

In this webinar, Dan Miller, lead analyst and founder of Opus Research, joins ValidSoft’s VP for North America, Shawn Edmunds, and Image Ware System’s CTO and VP David Harding to discuss how successful integration of highly optimized voice biometrics has never been easier or more cost effective for your business.

Text Messaging (SMS) is the gateway into the wide world of messaging apps that are becoming mainstays for search, comparison shopping, product selection and all manner of digital commerce. Join Dan Miller, Lead Analyst & Founder at Opus Research, and Tobias Goebel, Director of Emerging Technologies with Aspect Software, as they describe how the organic growth in messaging services from Twitter, WhatsApp, WeChat Facetime, and others have revolutionized digital commerce, technical support and customer care.

The proliferation of smartphones, geofencing, indoor location and analytics has transformed the meaning of "native" for mobile marketers, app developers and consumers. "Native" used to mean a reliance on Facebook and Google for in-stream ads that seem like organic content. It now refers to the use of on-device, local intelligence to get beyond the beacon to understand the context of a mobile user's interactions. Native control of functionality makes apps more popular with customers. It spells the difference between single-digit usage and delivers the full potential of personalized mobile marketing.

Just in time for Halloween, Dan Miller, lead analyst at Opus Research, will join Alexey Khitrov, president of SpeechPro Inc., to describe how voice and face recognition mean doom for the most common, and vulnerable, forms of mobile and online security.

Join Dan and Alexey in live, interactive webinar as they count the ways you can use new technologies to make mobile e-commerce safe, simple and secure.

Consumers are ambivalent about online privacy. Some surveys suggest outright hostility to mobile-location tracking; others argue users are happy to share personal information for clear rewards and benefits. Consumers also express a desire for greater personalization of online, mobile and shopping experiences. How can these contradictory positions be reconciled?

The privacy landscape is evolving rapidly with Apple making location privacy changes in iOS 8 and state governments getting involved in regulating privacy in the absence of federal action.

Rather than an “issue that will blow over,” privacy has become a central discussion for marketers and brands. It’s the flipside of “big data.” But timidity, passivity and denial won’t work. Stakeholders must proactively tackle the issue head on.

Join Greg Sterling, Senior Analyst with Opus Research, and Future of Privacy Forum founder Jules Polonetsky for an informative, interactive webinar about the latest developments in location and privacy on Wednesday, July 2, 10 am PDT /1 pm EDT.

Beacons are hot. Once dismissed by many, they are now being widely deployed in retail and grocery stores, stadiums and entertainment venues. Apple’s support for Bluetooth (iBeacon) has put the technology on the map and driven its growing adoption.

While many people have read about iBeacon, they don’t clearly understand what beacons can and can’t do. Join Opus Research Senior Analyst Greg Sterling and Steve Hegenderfer, director of developer programs at Bluetooth SIG, for an informative and interactive discussion about all things beacon.

Bluetooth SIG is the group that oversees the standards and licensing of Bluetooth. We assure you Hegenderfer will speak plain English during a presentation aimed at marketers, agencies and business decision-makers.

In this accessible, non-technical session you’ll learn:

• What iBeacon is and how it fits within the larger Bluetooth landscape
• How many different types of beacons there are and who makes them
• The cost, lifespan and transmission range of beacons
• Optimal indoor beacon use cases (and things that beacons don’t do well)
• How marketers/retailers can avoid spamming consumers with beacon triggered notifications
• How indoor messaging and notifications can be personalized
• Whether beacons can equally be used for indoor marketing and analytics

As smartphones now play key roles in e-commerce and personal communications for hundreds of millions of mobile users, our advice is, “authenticate early and often.” As using the prevailing PIN and password-based systems is easier said than done, voiceprints provide the easy-to-implement and easy-to-use alternative that supports a “unified” approach to mobile authentication.
 
Join Dan Miller, senior analyst and founder of Opus Research, and Nik Stanbridge, vice president of product marketing at VoiceVault, to engage in a lively discussion of:
 
· How mobility is driving the need for stronger authentication to build trusted links between and among individuals and enterprises

· What voice biometrics technologies are; and how they differ from other factors for promoting security and personalization

· How a unified approach to design and deployment saves time, money and effort for application developers and solution providers

· How to get started to gain experience with a unified voice biometric product
 
Executives at firms with an interest in providing the best, most personalized mobile experience for customers and employees should take part in this webcast. So should mobile application developers who recognize that strong, simple authentication is key to supporting secure payments and highly personalized services. 

There’s a great deal of hype surrounding iBeacon right now. But that technology is just one part of a much larger story about indoor location.

Using a range of technologies, major retailers, malls, airports and others are testing or rolling out indoor location in their venues and stores. We’ve come a great distance since last year when few people understood the benefits of indoor positioning and real-world analytics.

Join aisle411, iInside and Opus Research’s Greg Sterling for a webinar and discussion about the current state of indoor location. The webinar will feature existing, in-market B2B and B2C case studies.

What you’ll learn:

•How in-store mobile brand advertising impacts sales
•How indoor location can be used to combat retail showrooming
•How in-store (and even department level) presence is being used to measure the offline effectiveness of traditional and digital advertising.

Dan Miller, Senior Analyst with Opus Research, presents results from the latest Opus Research “Intelliview” report. He will describe criteria that should be taken into account when marketing, sales and contact center professionals evaluate vendors of Enterprise Virtual Assistants (EVAs) – especially those providing human-like interactions on the Web and with mobile devices.

Miller will be joined by Brett Beranek, Solutions Marketing Manager at Nuance Communications, who will provide insights into customer acceptance of EVAs based on implementations of Nuance’s Nina Web and Nina Mobile services.

Place Conference 2013 brought together the entire spectrum of companies building the indoor location ecosystem. Retailers, technology vendors, mobile developers, data providers, advertisers, agencies, and investors attended this unique, one-day event at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco and was the first-of-its-kind anywhere.

Demand for safe, secure, simple ways to carry out business online and over mobile phones is building. People are tired of remembering passwords or carrying pieces of hardware. It’s time to take concrete steps to implement safe, simple and secure authentication methods.

Join Dan Miller, Senior Analyst at Opus Research and Nik Stanbridge, Vice President of Product Marketing at VoiceVault, to hear about the best ways to get started with the technology. Find out what’s working among the dozens of implementations and learn what solutions are available “off-the-shelf” and why it's getting easier to integrate voice into mobile and multi-factor authentication initiatives and see the potential to make voice-based authentication foundational to personalized mobile services.

Join Opus Research and NICE Systems for a fact-filled discussion of passive voice authentication. Companies deploy this technology in the contact center to overcome adoption barriers and garner financial and operational benefits that pave the way for bringing strong authentication to all customer touchpoints.

Customer care specialists have already discovered that huge benefits result when they shorten the time required for caller authentication. Shorter calls save costs and increase customer satisfaction. New technologies enable them to take a passive approach to customer enrollment, accelerating the time it takes to extend these benefits to all callers and stepping up the pace at which trusted communications links can be established.

Dan Miller, senior analyst at Opus, will describe the trend toward passive enrollment and authentication, what it is and why it’s important for firms in financial services, telecommunications, retailing, healthcare, insurance and government. Jade Kahn, Solutions Marketing Manager at NICE, will then outline the steps that companies can take to move ahead with passive authentication and provide a proposed roadmap from contact center to support multiple customer and consumer touchpoints.

Register now to learn:
•Why is there so much excitement about passive enrollment?
•Where passive enrollment can be leveraged?
•What is involved from the caller’s perspective
•What are the financial benefits in the contact center?
•Where do I start?

Opus Research webcasts follow at BYOQ (Bring Your Own Questions) policy. Learn how you can benefit almost immediately from this exciting new technology.

The offline impact of digital ads has always been elusive. Marketers track “online conversions” mostly because they can’t follow consumers into stores (where 94% of buying happens). But online conversions are just a fraction of “online-to-offline” sales.

Increasingly it’s becoming possible to track how online/mobile ads directly impact offline consumer behavior. The implications are dramatic for all of digital media and marketing.

Placed CEO David Shim and xAd VP Monica Ho will discuss how new measurement tools let agencies, brands and marketers go beyond CTR to understand mobile advertising’s impact on store visits.

Placed has developed a “Nielsen panel for the real world” and xAd is starting to use it on client campaigns. Join them, together with Greg Sterling, senior analyst with Opus Research, for a free webinar that will examine:

•The market trend toward closed-loop measurement
•How offline panel measurement works
•What new insights are now available to marketers, publishers and networks
•Why offline ROI measurement is a key to shifting more ad budgets to digital
•A just-completed case study on mobile-to-store measurement

One of the most profound developments in digital marketing, customer care and analytics is advent of indoor location. While this new "industry" is in its infancy, it's impact will be profound over time. 

Indoor location and marketing are being made possible by the mass adoption of smartphones and nearly ubiquitous public WiFi. But we're just starting to imagine what's possible: more personalized shopping experiences, better data on customer behavior, and greater visibility into what online and mobile ads actually deliver people to the point of sale. 

Indoor location represents the true marriage of the online with the offline. Yet indoor location and marketing are still not well understood. Join Jon Rosen, EVP with iInside, and Greg Sterling, senior analyst with Opus Research, as they explore: 

• What indoor location technologies are in use today? 
• What data can be captured and are being captured? 
• Consumer willingness to share indoor location 
• Specific retail and merchant case studies 
• Privacy considerations
• Venue adoption timelines 
• Broader digital marketing implications