Plaza Associates Selects Nexidia Speech Analytics to Ensure Compliance & Improve Collections Performance

ATLANTA–Nexidia, the market-leading provider of audio search and speech analytics solutions, today announced that Plaza Associates has adopted Nexidia’s Enterprise Speech Intelligence (ESI) application to improve risk management and enhance revenue performance for its collections centers. Headquartered in New York City, Plaza is the largest accounts receivable management company in the city, with locations around the globe. Plaza’s collections center employs 390 people in New York City and hundreds more offshore. The contact center operations handle a weekly volume of approximately 285,000 calls.

Today, more stringent state and federal compliance laws are being created regarding collection industry practices, and modifications in those laws are routine. Given this constantly changing regulatory landscape, Plaza recognized the need to proactively ensure compliance in its collections practices.

By deploying flexible speech analytics, the company is now able to monitor 100% of its recorded calls in a fraction of the time previously required by manual review. With information to manage and coach collection agents delivered right to their desktops, managers have seen their productivity improve by 30%. In addition, through benchmarking against best practices for handling these types of calls, overall collections performance rates have improved as the company is now able to roll out initiatives that focus on making agents more effective in their ability to collect. Most importantly, the technology provides a structure enabling Plaza to reduce risk by pinpointing and correcting inappropriate collector behavior, ensuring the company remains in regulatory compliance.

“Plaza Associates’ vision is to be at the forefront of innovation in strategy and technology, and leveraging insight from Nexidia speech analytics is integral to that goal,” said Mike Petrone, director of operations for Plaza Associates. “By identifying possible compliance issues or process road blocks, Nexidia is giving both Plaza and our customers a competitive edge in the industry.”

“Today, customers are applying speech analytics to quickly solve complex, sensitive business problems,” said John Willcutts, president and chief executive officer of Nexidia Inc. “Nexidia provides Plaza with the flexibility and efficiency to mitigate risk, as well as the business intelligence to increase collector productivity and performance.”

Plaza’s speech analytics deployment is the direct result of Nexidia’s partnership with Noble Systems, a leading provider of contact center platforms with a special emphasis in the collections industry. Nexidia and Noble Systems have been working together since 2007 and their collaboration was critical for Plaza’s success.

“Our partnership with Nexidia offers Plaza the best of both worlds: an award-winning contact center platform with superior speech analytics tools to maximize intelligence,” said Chris Hodges, senior vice president of sales at Noble Systems. “Plaza’s reliance on ESI and Noble’s contact center technology suite has increased productivity and bottom-line savings.”

Learn more about Plaza Associates’ use of the Nexidia speech analytics solution. This video features Mike Petrone and Jeff Stroum of Plaza, discussing how Nexidia’s patented phonetic indexing and search technology analyzes their recorded calls, quickly extracts business intelligence and identifies issues and processes that need improvement.

About Plaza Associates
Plaza Associates, ranked by The Nilson Report as one of the top ten consumer collection agencies in the U.S, generated approximately $135 million in collections in 2008. With approximately 390 employees, Plaza Associates has its corporate office in New York, and partnerships in the Philippines and India. The company collects debt in the bank card, installment loan, mortgage, retail, telecommunications, automotive, commercial, and utility sectors. In 2009, Plaza Associates became the first collection company in the industry to be only employee-owned. Research shows that employee owned companies that effectively promote employee involvement outperform competitors by a substantial margin.

About Noble Systems®
Noble Systems Corporation is a global leader in contact center technology solutions, providing innovative products since 1989. Every day, millions of customer contacts are made by agents at 4,000+ client installations worldwide using the award-winning Noble platform for inbound/outbound/blended communications. The scalable, integrated Noble® solutions include advanced ACD and predictive dialing; unified contact processing; and integrated IVR, recording, messaging, quality/monitoring systems, scripting, and real-time reporting and management tools. Based in Atlanta, GA, Noble Systems was the first vendor to offer an open, scalable, fully-distributed platform. http://www.noblesys.com

About Nexidia
Nexidia is the audio and video search company with patented technologies and breakthrough applications that enable customers to quickly gain new insight, build competitive advantage and realize the amazing possibilities now discoverable in audio and video content from contact centers, media outlets, government intelligence and legal discovery. For more information, please visit http://www.nexidia.com/.