TuVox Speech Central

Die Zeit –Germany’s largest newspaper– ran an exclusive interview with Dr. Manish Sharma, TuVox’ SVP of Solutions Delivery.

In it, Sharma talks about the future of speech and how humans are (and will be) interacting with technology.  A good read!

The current economic situation has put an unprecedented strain on contact centers.

Revenues and budgets are down, but customers still keep calling. How can today’s contact centers get out of this trap?

Sign Up for the live webcast on April 28th.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

• How to dramatically reduce service costs without compromising quality
• How next-generation IVR has changed the way customers are engaged
• New market research and customer service techniques
• 5 Methods for stopping the flow of money out of your contact center

Sign up now!

There was a really great segment of NPR’s Talk of the Nation called ‘Your Call Is (Not That) Important To Us‘ (March 31, 2009).

For her new book, author Emily Yellin did extensive research around the concept of “customer rage” and found a way to to quantify the exasperation we feel when we call into contact centers.  For example:

• 70% of callers feel rage
• 28% yell at the customer service rep
• 8% curse at the customer service rep
• 15% want revenge
• 1% actually get revenge

Despite all of this hostility, the segment ends on an upbeat note:

Fortunately, Yellin thinks it’s possible things will improve. She concludes that thanks to the Internet and global competition, companies are going to have to take their customers’ needs more seriously.

Let’s hope so!

Last week, TuVox made the first major announcement of 2009 with the press release ‘TuVox “New Deal” Revolutionizes Speech Application Ownership’.

To summarize:

With the TuVox Accelerated ROI Program, companies pay a substantially reduced upfront implementation fee for the configuration and set up of their TuVox On Demand voice automation solutions.

We had a great week for coverage of this concept.  To paraphrase Dan Miller of Opus Research:

More recently, thanks largely to efforts by Tuvox and a small cohort of application development and management specialists, enterprises are being offered speech solutions in a way that more closely matches spending to business benefit.

Another positive response came from Speech Technology Magazine:

…the program reduces up-front costs common to speech technology implementations and upgrades. And this… allows enterprises to quickly see the financial benefits of a speech investment.

I’ll keep updating this as we get more coverage.  Thanks, everyone!

“Dad, can I ask you a question?”

The seven most dreaded words a parent can hear.  It means you are about to have an awkward conversation about birds, bees, storks, and maybe even a human body part or two.

You can imagine the panic I felt when my 7-year old casually uttered them.  I nodded blankly as my mind raced for the words my father had used.

The came the follow up question.

“What’s a server upgrade?”

I responded with an eloquent “Huh?” as I looked at the Webkinz logo on his computer screen.

Let me back up a step, in case you don’t know any 5 to 10 year-olds.  Webkinz are furry stuffed animals you can buy for $10-20 at most toy stores, gift shops, etc.  Each Webkinz pet comes with an “secret code”  to log into the website.  There you will find a virtual representation of your stuffed animal.

In the Webkinz world, you feed, bathe, and play with your virtual pet.  Like most things my kids are into, I don’t fully understand it, but the kids love it.

Apparently, the enormous popularity of these critters has gotten to the point where the Webkinz World IT infrastructure is busting at the seams.  Hence, the error message.

Relieved, I calmed replied to my son that if the Webkinz world was Linux-based, they may be mounting additional storage devices via the mount -t command, and if the Webkinz world was Windows-based they might be applying service packs.  And, if the virtual Webkinz  world was actually virtualized on VMware, anything could happen.  The universe might collapse on itself.

He stared at me blankly as he reached for his Nintendo DS.

The Wall Street Journal reports that so-called ’small investors’ are being routed to automated call centers instead of being connected to their broker.  The problem is two-fold: brokerage houses have reclassified a lot of long-term investors as ’small’ without telling tell; and they’re treating the shift to call centers as some kind of punishment.  Instead of selling it as a feature, they’re all put telling customers they’re now second class citizens.

This brings-up an interesting issue.  How does one best educate ones client base to see on-demand speech and other IVR systems as a benefit and not a punishment?

Answer: it’s all about the experience.  More on this later…

Over at the always-readable Customer Experience blog, Lou Columbus‘ latest post provides good food for thought, observing that companies aren’t providing their customers with as much information as they once did back in the Good Olde Days ™ when the nation’s economy wasn’t in a free-fall state:

They are locking down knowledge as if it were cash, not sharing nearly as much anymore.

There are two issues here.  First, knowledge is cash, as any patent attorney will freely acknowledge.  If your business model includes charging for expended customer support, one would hope you’d have a way to determine who pays and who doesn’t, yes?

The other problem with the ‘information just wants to be free’  argument is that is costs money to share information.  That customer service rep on the line is typically not there out of some religious conviction: s/he expects to be paid.

On-Demand speech solutions by TuVox help solve both issues by lowering the cost of sharing information while making sure that that the human who wants live customer support is entitled to receive it.  Now that’s smart sharing.

TMC publisher Nadji Tehrani writes in Customer Inter@ction Solutions magazine, “In a recessionary economy, experience teaches us that a company can lose as much as 50–60% of its customers.”

Wow.

While the thrust of Tehrani’s piece is on the value of outbound call center activity for lead generation purposes, it makes one reflect on the value of not annoying your customer for business retention purposes. Every unanswered call, every touch-tone tree from Dante’s 9th Circle of Customer Service Hades, every missed opportunity to use an inbound call to not only retain, but upsell, is a tragedy in any economy, much less during a recession.

All the more reason to take a look at one of our On-Demand speech applications.

Businesses ‘got religion’ during the ‘01 downturn and now care about their customers, according to this story by Pam Baker in CRMBuyer.

Missing in this otherwise interesting story on call center best practices is the importance the initial contact between the customer and the call center. The pointy end of the stick, as it were.

Too many companies see implementing a speech solution as an either/or affair. Shutting down a call center completely in favor of a speech solution (even one as good as ours) is almost never a good idea.

Using TuVox to augment a call center, cutting wait times, routing the call properly, and eliminating the need to speak to a call center agent in many cases…well, that’s a great way to add a TuVox speech solution into the call center mix.

Keeping your customers happy (and sticky) while saving money is not a bad way to ride out an economic downturn, yes?

I’d like to take this opportunity to blatantly promote our upcoming webcast called Take a Byte Out of Support Costs.

It’s a 15-minute case study of a TuVox customer that is in the hyper-competitive personal computer industry.

Register for the event here.

Here’s an excerpt:

While warranty callers waited on hold, non-warranty callers received free technical support.

Find out how TuVox On Demand saves this company hundreds of thousands of dollars each month with a simple-but-effective IVR-based warranty validation system.

Today, warranty callers get help fast, and non-warranty callers can choose a paid support option or web-based self-help.

I hope you’ll join us on January 28th!

Register here.