CEO of Nemesysco – Amir Liberman joins us in this SalesTechStar interview to discuss ways in which sales and marketing leaders can use voice analysis to benefit their overall strategies.
Catch the excerpts to grab key insights that can impact your sales outreach:
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Can you tell us a little about yourself Amir? We’d especially love to know more about your voice analysis research – what have been your biggest learnings that you’d like to share from this?
My research into voice analytics started in early 1997 following a terror attack here in Israel that took the lives of three young mothers. My main ambition back then was to build a new type of Lie Detector that would be easy to use and difficult to fool.
At the time, I had limited background in voice analysis or even phonetics, but being a software engineer, I was eager to figure out how an older technology claiming to be able to detect lies worked.
The general consensus back then around the approaches to lie detection was very different then it is today. When I started my research, most took the definition of Lie Detector at face value in that all lies were considered equal and that all lies should trigger a similar response in the detecting system.
What we discovered is that lies are derived from different needs and appear differently in the voice each with a different accompanying set of emotions. We further discovered that this emotional set can be classified. Here we learned that while the physiological reactions are the same for all the different emotional states, like stress, excitement and uncertainty, the voice acts very differently and allows you to differentiate between many emotional reactions and processes.
Since then, our research and technology have become much more versatile and are no longer limited to lie detection and security. Sales is one of the major applications of our offerings to the market that we focus on. Other areas include human resources, insurance and healthcare.
Can you share your top findings from your voice analysis programs that can benefit sales and technology sales leaders?
Our approach to voice analytics can position sales and marketing staff to be able to sense what potential customers feel at every moment and understand important insight, like what elements of your offer are the most appealing or what really bothers them or what should be avoided to improve any sales process and tune your sales pitch.
Some of the emotions that can be detected and measured with our Layer Voice Analysis technology include levels of engagement, concentration and passion as well as negative signs that can shorten the sales process. In addition, with our approach managers reviewing calls are now able to see clearly where conversations went wrong and improve training as well as identify the early signs of successful and not successful sales process.
Where would you like to see your research and technology (product) create an impact, in what industries?
The ability to genuinely see how people feel and identify levels of emotions that are not necessarily expressed outwardly can have a tremendous impact on many industries.
Let’s take a look at the call center space, where many today are operated by both humans and robots. The level of the personalization of service will be the key issue in the coming years. Our technology provides the means to quickly learn the needs and basic emotional style of the customer and offer even robotic response systems with the ability to develop a “Virtual Personality” that will be most compatible with the personality of the customer.
In the human resources space, we will soon introduce a new generation of personality tests that are based on true sensations and seek to go much deeper than existing approaches. These tests improve the prediction and empower the recruiter as well as the candidate with knowledge that was never previously available.
Another area is with medical data where emotional measurements can be processed by AI or Big Data engines in order generate new findings and pave the way for the next generation of medical services that connect physical and mental readings.
What were some of your biggest challenges when initially developing the concept and product? We’d especially love to know how you overcame one of the most common challenges in tech today – sourcing and hiring the right candidates in a startup!
The biggest challenges we have faced over the years are the assumptions that potential customers make about measuring emotions and expectations for deploying these new capabilities. For example, in the call center space, many customers want to be able to identify angry callers. However, this is very broad and rather vague from the perspective our technological approach. Anger is not an isolated moment in the call and a caller can expression this emotion at many stages throughout the processes of interacting with the agent. With time agents are able to better understand how to approach callers and less management attention is required.
As for recruiting, thankfully we have had good fortune with attracting qualified staff to work with our exciting technology.
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Given the evolving salestech landscape, what according to you will drive demand for specific tools and technologies like yours, how do you foresee tools such as these growing in demand over time? Or rather, what kind of sales technologies do you feel will be more in demand, over time?
The entire service world, including sales, is going after a Wow level of service. While this concept is more advanced in some regions and vertical markets, it will definitely be the battleground among service providers in the years to come. Any type of technology that will facilitate improving the personalization of the sales and service approach will be in demand.
What are some of the common pain points you observe in technology sales and how would you advise sales teams optimize/overcome these challenges by optimizing use of their sales tech stack (and how).
Market education is always challenging, especially when dealing with conservative entities. Also, there is always pressure to show an immediate return-on-investment when introducing new technologies.
Today, focus is often placed on how technology can reduce human labor costs and reduce complexity. In my opinion, this is the wrong approach and somewhat superficial. The better approach is to show how technology and humans achieve an optimal synergy in different processes and how this synergy brings new values and extended benefits to the end user organization.
Tag (mention/write about) the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read!
I very much enjoy working with Dr. Christophe Morin. He is a market leader in this space and I would certainly be happy if he were to read this interview article. His approach to sales processes and market research are very interesting.
Could you share your favorite Sales/SalesTech quote and also some of your favorite entrepreneurial / leadership/ sales books that have been a valuable read!
Dr. Morin wrote a very insightful book called The Persuasion Code. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this topic.
Tell us about some of the top sales/salestech/ other events that you’ll be participating in (as a speaker or guest!) in 2020!
I will be speaking at the upcoming Customer Focus 2020 convention in Israel about the Wow Effect and superb level of service using instant rapport collection techniques. Beyond this event, we are currently considering participating in additional conferences across Europe.
We’d love to know a little about your future plans!
At Nemesysco, we are now getting ready for the release of our new call center suite of products and this is currently occupying most of my time. Looking a little further into the future, we want to start a long term research project to correlate our deeper sensing technologies with improved predictions of customer behaviors and decision making processes and wider use of AI to drive more success to our partners and customers.
Amir Liberman is a leading researcher in the field of voice and emotion analysis. He is the CEO of Nemesysco, a provider of voice analysis technologies and solutions, and is the driving force behind expanding the applications of the company’s unique Layer Voice Analysis technology.