I’m calling customer support to complain about fraudulent charges to my health insurance. Some joker has rung up multiple doctor visits to clinics in Miami, Florida — a place I’ve never even wanted to visit.

At least, that’s according to the prearranged script. In reality, I’ve been invited to get a first hand dose of eLoyalty (ELOY), a behavioral-analytics and customer-relations outfit that promises — among other things — to boost call-center productivity and speed customers painlessly through what many might count as their most exasperating minutes on earth.

The company touts its NASA tech and endless possibilities for making customers happy — so much so that I had to try it out myself.

Trained to pick up on verbal clues that indicate different personality types, my service rep, Lila, catches that I’m not serene like a “Yoda” or emotionally focused like an “Oprah” — two of six basic profiles in eLoyalty’s arsenal. Rather, she figures out that I’m belief-focused, with a strong helping of matter-of-factness, and helps me through the rest of call with no nonsense and no profuse apologies.

Not bad.

You’ve probably never heard of eLoyalty, but they’ve almost certainly heard you — and quickly pegged your personality by analyzing nothing more than your voice over the phone, parsing your words, pauses and even inflections on the spot.

The company works with call centers that handle the nation’s biggest car-insurance firms, banks and health care organizations. They’re usually the ears listening in after the automated message promises you, “This call is being recorded for quality assurance.”

It is no giant. Founded in 1990, the company is mostly privately held, and lost $2.7 million in the third quarter of 2010 on revenues of $23.3 million, according to SEC filings.

ELoyalty’s premise is that training customer-service representatives, or CSRs, to quickly diagnose which of the six types of personalities a caller is leads to happier customers and shorter calls. And shorter calls matter, because when it comes to customer service, time is money — somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 to $1.50 per minute, depending on how you account for it.

And it promises even more. ELoyalty says that its system can help companies know the core personality type of each of their customers, so they can individually tailor websites and e-mails to each one. Taken to its logical conclusions, it could promise a new model of customer targeting that’s far less invasive that web tracking — if it actually works.

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