SpeechTEK 2007 - Speech Technology Becomes More Mainstream

SpeechTEK brings together the people who build the telephone voice response systems that are becoming a ubiquitous part of our lives. As Christopher Herot reports, while many of these systems are downright annoying, the cost savings are impressive - one estimate was that every second shaved from the human interaction in a directory assistance application saves the phone company $7 million. The developers are keenly aware that the caller is not always enthusiastic about speaking to a robot and in fact measure their success by reducing the percentage of the time the caller presses 0 to get to a human being.

The opening keynote speaker perhaps signals a different way of approaching this. Mike Cohen is Google’s speech technology group manager and was previously with Nuance. He focused primarily on his company’s speech-powered mobile program, GOOG411. This service, which is currently available in the USA, allows cell phone users to get directory information using voice commands. As Cohen noted, when searching on the mobile Web, users want specific information fast. To tackle this challenge, Cohen suggested speech technology has an advantage over traditional means of data entry. He underlined the importance of keeping an “obsessive focus on the end-user.”

With the resources that Google and others are putting into similar applications, it is likely that callers will more readily accept similar speech technology systems. If such systems deliver good user experiences, it is less and less likely that callers will inevitably go for the 0 key and be willing to wait their turn for a human operator.

Orange Confirms The Trend To IVR With Speech Recognition

In May 2006, Computing saw only a slow-moving trend towards the use of speech recognition technology. A few UK companies including Powergen, British Airways, Lloyds TSB, Barclays and Odeon were adopting such systems. The holiday firm First Choice joined this select band with a customer contact centre in Manchester, handling 600 calls a day, and dealing with the most common enquiries about balances owed on holidays, making payments and checking on ticket status.

At the time, a Gartner analyst Steve Cramoysan predicted steady, rather than spectacular, growth. He suggested, ‘One thing that may push things along faster is Google, which is talking about introducing voice search over mobile phones. If that happens, it will take this technology down a whole new high-profile track.’

Google is clearly putting major effort into this area but as yet they have not revealed plans. Nevertheless in advance of that, the advantages of using speech technology are being increasingly recognized and exploited by the front-runners. Mobile phone network operator Orange has announced that it will improve customer service with the implementation of a speech recognition system. The move is part of a £100m investment in customer services in the light of increasing criticism from consumer groups about poor service at the company. Orange added 1,000 call centre agents in the last year and will now upgrade its customer service systems by improving the underlying platforms that route incoming calls.

Given the poor reputation of the telecommunications companies for customer service, it may be expected that other telecoms will be following the Orange lead.

Related:
Customer Service From Telecommunications Companies

Local Call Center Agents On The Way Out - Perhaps Not.

As the New York Times recently reported, Booz Allen Hamilton, a management-consulting firm, and Duke University studied 600 companies last year and found a continued increase not just in outsourcing, but also offshoring, in which call centers are moved overseas.

One company bucking the trend is Netflix. They are fighting Blockbuster for DVD sales by mail. They have set up their call center in the greater Portland area because of the genial attitude on the part of most service workers. Michael Osier, vice president for information technology operations and customer service, said he rejected cities like Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, which are known as call-center capitals, because of their high employee turnover rates. Matt Mani, a senior associate at Booz Allen said, “This is a unique strategy for Netflix. There’s so much more competition, this is something they’ve done to get closer to the customer, because without that, there’s really no connection a customer has to Netflix.”

Netflix’s decision to greet anxious consumers with a human voice is now unusual in corporate customer service. It also represents a high cost choice. It you hire too few human agents then callers must wait interminably for one to come free. To ensure a rapid response, there must be enough call agents to answer calls within a short time delay. The hiring, training and scheduling of sufficient call agents are quite a challenge.

Rather than relying solely on human call agents, a better and more economic solution is to combine Natural Speech IVR agents with human agents. Simpler caller requests can be handled by the IVR agents. More complex calls or those where the caller wishes to speak to a human agent can be rapidly transferred to a well-trained and welcoming agent. Such a combined system gives greater flexibility to deliver better caller experiences with optimal use of the available human agents. Such ongoing optimization is an integral part of a Crimsonet IVR project.

Since a combined system like this delivers greater caller satisfaction and good economics, it will ensure that local call-center agents are with us for a long time to come.

IVR Doesn’t Spell Frustration

In the online Montreal Gazette feature on “Your call is important to us”, Roberto Rocha has an interesting interview with Mark Goldberg, a telecom consultant. Goldberg is probably representing the average telecom executive’s view in the following:

The real challenges for the communication industry are the same of almost the entire inbound call centre industry. People aren’t necessarily having a worse experience with telecoms. They just have more reason to call the telecom than any other type of utility.

Because of the volume of calls, it’s incumbent on the service provider to handle those calls as cost effectively as possible. That’s where I think people run into the greatest frustration. Cost effective is not a compatible characteristic with down home friendly service.

I understand one of major coffee shop chains in Canada has trained employees to not be friendly. They smile and everything but it’s not efficient to get into a friendly conversation in a fast food coffee shop. That same principle applies to mass volume call centres.

In order to handle calls more quickly, telecoms have stuck those automated voice systems before the human agents. And that’s as unfriendly as it can get. It’s a huge frustration level, especially when you have to wait while hearing that your call is important to them. If you felt my call was really important, you’d have enough people to handle my call.

But what the company is attempting to do is lower their cost structure. The alternatives are to pass on the cost to consumers or ship all service overseas, which can result in a deterioration of service.

In summary, we’re no worse than anyone else and the only alternatives are less satisfactory.

The “E Source 2007 Review of North American Electric and Gas Company IVRs” would certainly confirm that average view. They assessed the IVR systems of 103 U.S. and Canadian utilities. They found that utility customers consistently report lower levels of satisfaction when they use an IVR compared to talking directly with a phone agent, dealing in person with an agent, or even interacting with their utility at the utility web site.

The point is that not all IVR systems are created equal. Modern technology can ensure that IVR is able to respond intelligently to clients. That’s what the report found for the highest rated companies such as Cleco Power, Florida Power & Light, Progress Energy (Florida), Sacramento Municipal Utility District, and Omaha Public Power District.

Sandy Goodwin, director of the E Source Utility Customer Care Service, points the way. “Highly rated IVRs are providing a convenient way for customers to interact with their utility, but they are also helping the utility to reduce operating expenses. Increasingly, good IVRs are key to the success of a utility’s call center. The best systems highlighted by our review offered the functions that customers wanted and made those functions easy to find and to use.”

We’re No Worse Than Anyone Else

The title is a phrase you probably recognize instantly. Tom Peters who wrote In Search of Excellence in 1982 often told the story about the company where he heard this. Everyone related to it. For example Bob Stone working in the US federal government quoted it in an excellent article on Culture Change in February 1999.

As he said:

Six years ago Vice President Gore gave me and 200 other career federal employees the chance to figure out what was wrong with the federal government and what to do about it. For us it was the chance of a lifetime, a chance to use our talents to the fullest, to let us take charge of our part of the world, to change the very culture of government, to change our work so that it would be admired and appreciated by the American people.

He went on to say:

So, based on my own credentials as a culture changer, and on the infallible authority of “Yes, Minister” and Dilbert, I can confidently contradict the other experts and say this about government: we may be risk adverse, but we’re no worse than anybody else.

Unfortunately the phrase is just as applicable now. It came to mind in reading an article on “Why Loyal Customers Are Harder to Find Today” The answer to that question seemed to be that since customers now have more choices they are more demanding. It was almost as if the problem was the customers.

You can regard this as bad news or good news. If your competitors are applying the standard of We’re no worse than anyone else, then you have a real opportunity to steal their customers. Unfortunately few companies seem to be taking this opportunity when it comes to customer service.

Poor IVR and Untrained Human Operators Both Frustrate Customers

Tim Searcy of the American Teleservices Association comments that Call center problems go global. Around the world, similar problems are very evident.

First, offshoring is a concern in each local market. Representatives from Australia, Europe, Asia and the Middle East voiced the same complaints about “foreigners” answering toll-free phone calls on behalf of products and services companies. Universally, there appears to be a distrust of someone outside of a person’s own country handling a service or sales issue.

Second, technology without training has decreased customer satisfaction. Call center software Aspect has expanded its customer satisfaction index to include Europe but the results are similar to the United States. Consumers desperately want to experience first call resolution from trained individuals that are pleasant. The interactive voice response has replaced good satisfaction design in many cases and worldwide there is an epidemic of frustration about IVR jungles and lengthy queues.

Interactive Voice Response systems, as supplied by Crimsonet, can avoid these types of problems.

Voice 2.0 and IVR

Voice 2.0 is the title of a conference that will take place in Ottawa on November 5 - 6, 2007. The term, Voice 2.0, was first coined late in 2005. To an extent it builds on the notion of Web 2.0, which was coined by Tim O’Reilly.The conference description points to some exciting developments:

Voice 2.0, or New Telephony, has arisen as a result of the convergence of Telecom and the Web. In the process, heavily communications oriented Web 2.0 applications are placing new demands on network infrastructure, and developers of traditionally computing centric products such as video games and business process applications, are discovering whole new opportunities when their products are augmented with human oriented communications ( i.e. voice).

Paul Graham has pointed out that Web 2.0 acknowledges some of the basic principles of the Internet. Democracy is much more powerful and users will not accept being maltreated.

Equally the Voice 2.0 principles should have the same impact on simpler applications such as IVR. The older style IVR systems controlled the user. Now users will insist on retaining control of the conversation, as is possible with modern IVR systems. This will put strong pressures on companies to upgrade to match their competitors.