TuVox Speech Central

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!

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.

I just read an interesting article by John I. Todor, Ph.D., on the blog The Perfect Customer Experience.

The entry places some tangible, scientific figures behind what we all intuitively know to be true: whether you provide good or bad customer service, your customers are going to talk about it. Here are a few interesting nuggets:

70% of word of mouth occurs “face-to-face” and only 8% occurs online.

Overwhelmingly, consumers have positive things to say about brands by a margin of more than 6 to 1. This contradicts the common notion people spread negative experiences more than positive.

78% of consumers rank word of mouth as credible at a level of 7 or higher on a 10 point scale.

Why is word-of-mouth marketing powerful?

We trust word of mouth because the person telling us puts the experience in a context that is meaningful to us. Since the peer-to-peer relationship is based on trust, the message is credible. So remember, the next time you’re stuck waiting on hold, or transferred around, or told to call back because the system is down: The Power of Word-of-Mouth.

I’ve written at great length about how you can have the “best of both worlds” — cost-saving automation AND high caller satisfaction.

I’ll concede that there are millions of ways to implement automation poorly and there are relatively few ways to do it right.  It’s a challenge, to be sure.

So I was happy to read an article at Next Generation Power and Energy that talked about exactly that.

“We’ve seen customer preferences shift in accepting technology over the years. Customer feedback now clearly shows that in many cases, customers prefer using technology for some transactions when it’s designed well.” says Tucker Mann, Vice President Customer and Market Services, Progress Energy.

It’s refreshing to see a public utility out in front of this issue.  Utilities have gotten a bad rap for their customer service, and now it seems companies like Progress Energy are leading the charge.

Kudos, Progress Energy!

You may have seen the press release or the article mentioning the Speech Technology Award won by Time Customer Service.

Time Customer Service is the global customer service, information systems, marketing services, and subscription fulfillment operation of Time, one of the world’s largest publishing companies, with a stable of titles that includes Time, People, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Money, Health, Entertainment Weekly, Essence, National Geographic, and Southern Living.

Time Customer Service has been able to automate 51 percent of all name and address change calls and 71 percent of all cancellation calls, equating to roughly 2 million calls previously handled exclusively by live agents. That has led to a 40 percent reduction in costs and increased call center capacity.

This award marks the fifth consecutive Speech Technology win for TuVox, following the “2007 Implementation Award” for Telecom New Zealand, the “2006 Most Innovative Solution” award for the TuVox Perfect Router deployment at Canon USA, the “Best Speech Application Award” in 2005 and the Speech Solutions CHALLENGE II Usability victory in 2004.

“Recipients of the Speech Technology magazine’s Speech Industry Awards are recognized for accomplishments that stand out from the crowd,” says David Myron, editorial director of Speech Technology magazine. “They have distinguished themselves through their individual accomplishments, service to the industry and the implementation of truly innovative new applications using speech technology.”

The recent issue of Business Week (3/3/2008) has an update on the “Get Human” initiative started by Paul English in 2005.

For anyone living under a rock during 2005-2006 when Paul was making the rounds of NPR and MSNBC, here’s what GetHuman is — you go to his website (www.GetHuman.com) and it lists a few hundred companies’ customer service numbers and tells you what to press or say to speak to a living, breathing person on the other end of the phone. Eureka!

After the initial novelty wore off, Get Human morphed into a proposed “standard”, with the half-hearted and opportunistic support of Nuance and Microsoft.

So here’s my take on this thing. When I read the Business Week article, I got the sense that the author (Jena McGregor) started out with a premise — Get Human is dead! – and pretty much wrote a page to support that preconceived notion.

If you actually go to GetHuman.com, you’ll see that a transformation has taken place since 2006.

Although the idea of a standard never took hold, the site now has a new focus. In addition to the IVR cheat sheet, there is a new “Consumer Rating” column, kind of like a Web 2.0 vigilante version of the Better Business Bureau.

And (hilariously), there is a column of affiliate web ads on the far right, implying that Get Human is paying its web hosting bills by driving traffic to the very companies they are exposing. Genius!

Angel.com’s Blog has an interesting take on the momentum loss of the Get Human movement. Ahmed Bouzid makes some very valid points about how the IVR/ACD vendors need to carry the flag to re-energize the campaign.

While that’s probably a sound approach, I prefer a market-driven strategy. In certain situations, people will always want to talk to a real person. Companies understand that. In other cases, the IVR is so unbelievably bad, people bail out because of sheer frustration.

Eventually, killer automation apps like the American Airlines IVR will prevail, and the lumbering old touch-tone dinosaurs will eventually die out.

And on that day, we might not need to “get human” any more.

TuVox Podcast: