TuVox Speech Central

In my last two articles, I floated the idea that fixing your call routing and eliminating touch-tone menus is the best way to improve your call center automation and satisfaction rates.

Then I went on to prove my case with some simple math.

Now the obvious question: Where in the world do I start?

There is a way to stick your toe in the water. You can outsource call routing leaving your IVR alone (for the time being) and have the routing application work seamlessly with your IVR and your agents. Outsourcing may or may not include physically locating the application outside of your enterprise.

Not only does this approach free you from having to make a capital investment, it allows you to run a small sample of your callers through the application and measure customer satisfaction before expanding traffic.

A huge added benefit in starting with routing is the visibility you can obtain into your callers’ intentions. Rather than a broad picture of how callers navigated a touch tone maze, you’ll see details about what they’re thinking when they call. The wealth of information you obtain will help you improve the routing application and give you a clear road map showing where to leave well enough alone, and what are your best candidates for new speech applications.

Another question: Are others in your business doing this?

Maybe, maybe not. But callers’ expectations are changing and if you are too focused on your competitors you might miss the bigger picture. As a consumer, I use natural language call routing when I call my bank, when I book my air travel, when I need to speak with an expert who can help me with my camera, when my iPod breaks, when I need to get support for my iPhone, when my phone bill doesn’t seem right, and even when I call my insurance company to report my teenager’s fender bender.

One thing is for sure: I’m going to expect as much when I call your call center, and if you force me to navigate a touch tone menu nothing that happens next is going to make me happy.

In my last article, I put forward the idea that the best way to improve your caller experience is by fixing your call routing and eliminating touch-tone menus. Now, let me give you the economics behind this approach.

Let’s assume your call center takes one million calls per month, your IVR is offered 30% of those and completes half. Let’s also assume that a call completed in automation saves your operation $1.00 per call.

A speech application which improves your call completion rate in your IVR by ten percent will yield a total additional saving of $360,000 per year — not bad.

But what could happen if you apply the same efforts to improving your routing experience? If a natural language routing interface can increase the calls offered to your IVR by the same 10%, your return almost doubles to $600,000.

The math works because fixing the top of the funnel has a multiple effect over tinkering with the bottom. Now that the cost of Natural Language call routing is on par with other applications, clearly routing is the biggest bang for your buck.

Now, if you take the same scenario and combine a 10% increase in calls offered from a natural language routing application with the 10% increase in call completion from your world class automated speech application, the total saving becomes $1,080,000.

This number approaches the ROI you enjoyed when you first implemented your old IVR, but that’s not the biggest benefit. Natural language routing allows twelve million (as apposed to 180,000) of your customers to receive a better caller experience regardless of whether the call is ultimately automated or handed off to a customer service agent. Done right, this positive experience will give your company the opportunity to associate your brand with 12 million more positive experiences every year.

You might be thinking a call routing approach has ten thousand more opportunities for something bad to happen. You could be right, but that same line of reasoning could have been used when you opened up your first call center. Not having a call center was not an option because you would eventually lose customers if they couldn’t get the information they wanted via the phone.

Now the bar has been raised and the same principle applies: you will eventually lose customers by not allowing convenient and timely access to the information callers require.

Read the next article in this series

Why is it that when businesses think of applying speech technology to their organization, their first thought is about replacing touch-tone IVR applications, some of which may be functioning perfectly well?

If your operation is like most call centers, you probably had someone responsible for your ACD routing and someone else designing your IVR. Maybe there’s a third person who has developed the CSR procedures for handling calls. The caller doesn’t view this as three separate experiences, so why shouldn’t you also be viewing the entire encounter from ‘hello’ to ‘goodbye’?

Here’s part of the problem in not taking a holistic view:

If you’ve decided to create the most compelling speech application known to man, and stick it underneath a DTMF driven routing application, you may still be forcing callers to navigate through six DTMF menus before they’re exposed to your world class application. So, you’ve already lost most callers before they hear the first “how can I help you”.

You’d literally be building a treasure for improving efficiency and satisfaction and burying it under six feet of dirt, leaving your callers with an arcane treasure map. There isn’t a caller in the world (other than Paul English and gethuman.com) who wants to take the time to learn your call navigation schema.

Perhaps the map is as important as the treasure? I’d argue that the map is a great deal more important and here’s why:

The promise of voice self-service is not the elimination of touch-tone (yes, you read that right). It’s the eradication of menus, and these menus negatively affect a great deal more callers at the top of your application than they do at the bottom.

Read the next article in this series.