Uniprise has spent "multiple millions of dollars" on the project but expects a payback within 10 months, Reinke said. Its broader goals are to use the software to improve employee retention and keep health care insurance customers happier, he added. "We're seeing if we move the needle on customer distress, and we're assuming that in turn will improve the customer experience."

But success requires more than just the use of software like BA, Reinke cautioned. "You can deploy it, [but] if you don't adopt different behaviors in the call center, you won't get any advantage," he said.

Chris Beck, an enterprise voice architect at Career Education Corp. in Hoffman Estates, Ill., saw a demonstration of Cisco's Interaction Analyzer at VoiceCon and said he considered it to be the "most intellectually exciting" product at the show. However, he added that his company has only 25 call center agents and probably wouldn't consider Cisco's offering at this point.

Future versions of BA-type tools may be able to automatically advise agents on how to handle individual callers, said Gartner Inc. analyst Matthew Goldman. Rivals to eLoyalty include CallMiner Inc., Nice Systems Ltd., Utopy Inc. and Verint Systems Inc., Goldman and other analysts said.