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

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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.

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…

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.”

Driving and any other activity shouldn’t go together because it’s really not multitasking but “distracted driving.”

Yet in our busy lives today, we are all trying to squeeze out that extra few minutes while we are driving. For example, while driving to work,

I want to make my credit card payment since it is already overdue by a day

or the stock market is crashing and I need to enter my order to cover my 1,450 cubes (QQQQ) short position?

or I am trying to find the nearest office products store to buy the special lamp we need for our LCD projector

Frequently, when I reach my credit card provider or my stock broker or my favorite office products store on the phone, I am served by the so-called all-efficient DTMF-IVR. “Thanks for calling (Your) Bank credit card. To ensure quality service and accuracy, your call will be recorded. Please enter your 21-digit account number followed by the # sign now…..” Now, if talking on a mobile phone without a hands-free device is considered distracted driving, I think keying in information using “touch-tone” while driving would rate as extremely dangerous! And considering that mobile phone keyboards continue to shrink in size – its almost impossible to key in numbers accurately while driving!

In California, beginning July 1, we all have to use hands-free devices – no more Touch-Tone while driving! Click here for more information.

I think businesses that serve me and you – our credit card bank, our stock broker and our office products store have a golden opportunity to help us here. Adding natural language speech automation to the contact center can serve us anytime (24 x 7), anywhere; provide a pleasant caller experience; and enable the service in a manner where we don’t need to key in information, we can just speak it.

That’s why I say “Don’t Touch-Tone and Drive, Just Speak It!”