Nexidia today added U.S. Cellular—a Chicago-based wireless provider with more than six million customers and close to $4 billion in revenues—Ventura, a U.K.-based company in the outsourcing industry, and Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania to its Center of Excellence Program.

The Center of Excellence Program—originally launched in February 2009—is a partnership with customers to showcase speech analytics best practices and promote the application’s strategic and economic value in contact centers and business operations.

According to Jeff Schlueter, vice president of marketing at Nexidia, the new inductees to the program were “hand selected” by Nexidia.

“We find and invite customers of ours who have adopted the use of speech analytics and implemented it in a way that is really driving business values,” he says. “So these are folks who really understand the value of business analytics and have deployed it not only to improve contact center operation, but also really starting to use speech analytics in other areas of the overall business.”

Schlueter says the Center of Excellence customers agree to work to share best practices—something that enables them to interact more closely with each other, share information, and share ideas.

“We also open up to them the opportunity to participate in early pre-release versions of software and give their input into new releases we might be coming out with,” Schlueter says, noting that Nexidia also benefits from the program.

“We get their ideas into our development process,” he says. “But they benefit, of course, because they get to get their ideas into the development process. So we look to them as one of the first sources for new product ideas or enhancements that we bring into the application set. It really is a two-way exchange of information.

“It really is a cross-industry representation,” Schlueter adds. “These are companies in various fields—telecommunications, health care, hospitality—so it really does showcase the fact that speech analytics can be used and is being used in a variety of situations. These are all customers that have implemented and have seen good strategic and bottom line business value out of speech analytics. So in that respect, they really are giving you a showcase for what is possible.”