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 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?

In grim economic times, the last thing a company can afford is to be serving-up poor customer service.  While this may seem like an obviousness to many –when business slows, why risk losing a customer ?– time after time companies cut costs in customer service, only to be shocked, shocked, when people buy elsewhere.

Yet call centers continue to close.  A quick scan of recent headlines shows a mixed bag of closures, relocations, and outsourcing.  And while some of these closures may be the result of shifting business needs (e.g., from catalog to on-line shopping), it’s probably fair to say that many customer service cutbacks are the result of simple shortsightedness.

At the same time, companies have an obligation to turn that penny over twice before spending: in an economic downturn, the customer may be king, but ROI is queen.  

TuVox On-Demand Speech applications offer companies the ability to  increase their ROI through a hosted IVR solution while simultaneously increasing the quality and speed of their customer’s call center experience. Saving money plus increasing service equals an ideal way to survive (and thrive) in a cloudy economy.

Thousands of unemployed Coloradans won’t receive their unemployment checks because they can’t get through to the call center, KWGN in Denver reports. One lady heard nothing but a busy signal for five-plus days.  The sound you hear is me repeatedly wacking my forehead with a telephone receiver as a result of reading this sorry tale of woe.

“We are just swamped with calls, more than we can take”…”many of the calls tying up the phone lines can be answered in the claimant handbook.” 

This is precisely the kind of problem that can be solved by one a TuVox speech solution.  The unemployed have enough problems in this economy without having to deal with this kind of nonsense.

TuVox can help solve Colorado’s problem, and we put our money where our mouth is with our Guaranteed Success Program.  We’d have one of our implementation team members call them, but their line’s busy.

And so it goes…