Call analytics provider CallMiner acquires screen capture platform OrecX

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CallMiner, a call analytics provider based in Waltham, Massachusetts, today announced that it has acquired audio and screen capture platform OrecX for an undisclosed sum. CallMiner says that by purchasing OrecX, it’ll gain “foundational technology” to feed conversation audio directly into CallMiner’s transcription services, improving both real-time and post-call conversation insights.

“As a long-time partner of CallMiner, the acquisition of OrecX is a natural fit. OrecX’s expertise in flexible, efficient audio capture is a true value-add within our strategy of expanding our market-leading conversation analytics platform, and delivering the insights that drive real business improvement for our customers,” CallMiner CEO and president Paul Bernard said in a press release. “We welcome the skilled OrecX team to CallMiner and look forward to further driving our growth together.”

Chicago, Illinois-based OrecX, which was founded in 2005 by Bruce Kaskey, Bruno Haas, Steve Kaiser, provides “enterprise-grade” call recording, quality management, and screen recording solutions. The company is the lead developer of Oreka GPL, an open source project that enables contact centers, enterprises, and services providers to leverage third-party speech analytics solutions from Avaya, Cisco, and others for compliance and risk management. To date, OrecX says that Oreka GPL has been downloaded upwards of 200,000 times and has racked up millions of users in more than 200 countries.

With the acquisition, OrecX cofounder and CEO Steve Kaiser says that CallMiner will enhance its platform and product portfolio for on-premise and contact center-as-a-service use cases. OrecX will also strengthen the company’s expansion into other markets, he says — specifically enterprise sales and healthcare.

“OrecX and CallMiner is a powerful combination – one that creates a unique offering for long-term success and more opportunities for our customers, partners, and employees,” Kaiser said in a statement. “We’re extremely confident in CallMiner’s go-to-market strategy, and believe that together, we’re poised to accomplish more.”

Changing landscape

The pandemic has changed individual preferences for interacting with businesses. Although 29% prefer to use digital channels to reach out to companies, according to a Vonage survey, 51% still prefer to use voice calls. The consistently high volume of that preference is prompting service providers to adopt analytics solutions, which can deliver a significant return on investment. A ContactBabel report found that for one contact center, analytics software like CallMiner’s led to a 41% improvement in sales conversions and a 20% increase in collections revenue.

According to another source, 83% of companies say that analytics and AI are strategic priorities in their path toward better customer experiences and management.

Founded in 2002, CallMiner is among the companies at the forefront of the call analytics boom. The brainchild of Jeff Gallino, Cliff LaCoursiere, and Kim Brown, the company’s software analyzes interactions across calls, chats, emails, surveys, and texts for sentiment, topic discovery, and more. CallMiner provides conversation reasons including behaviors, outcomes, competitors, and detects physical stress in callers’ voices, as well as changes in their stress and rates of speech. It also enables searches for pieces of conversational data, including the language contained within transcripts and the metadata or attributes associated with contacts

CallMiner — which raised more than $75 million in venture capital back in December 2019, bringing its total raised to around $160 million — competes in this space with Cogito, Asapp, Balto, and several others in the $1.31 billion contact center intelligence market.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz