TuVox Speech Central

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:

We’d like to give a warm congratulations to Telecom New Zealand, who won the prestigious 2007 Implementation Award by Speech Technology Magazine. The award is provided to companies who achieve significant results from their implementation. The results speak for themselves, and are the result of careful planning, attention to detail, and follow-through.

Check out the article on TMCnet at: TuVox Customer Wins Prestigious Implementation Award.

Personalization Arrives in the Voice Channel

It’s amazing how quickly you get used to personalized customer service. Most merchants and companies I do business with have a personalized web experience. On Amazon, Netflix, eBay I’m greeted by name. My recommendations are highly tailored and my account information is readily accessible.

I’ve been waiting for this for years on the phone, and it’s finally happened.

I was just greeted by name when I called American Airlines. It’s about time!

American has just deployed a really amazing new system that has some really cool features. My favorite is one of the simplest — I can opt-in so my cell phone is recognized, so I’m immediately identified and authenticated.

“Thanks for calling American Airlines. Welcome back, Steve.” It’s very cool. Better yet, I get proactive service — when I’ve got a flight coming up, I automatically get flight status. When I land, I’m offered help with lost baggage. If I need to be rebooked, it is handled automatically. The most common options are menu-free — they’re proactively offered.

The phone has taken a huge step forward.

Are you an American frequent flyer? Try it! You can get information on the American Airlines website.

TuVox built this system using multiple personalization techniques. A series of dynamic features are used to create a highly personalized experience. Some of the personalization features include greeting by name and context-specific menus — so that I’m only offered appropriate choices at any point.

The other key element of a next-generation personalized experience is what we refer to as ‘anticipating intent’. The American application looks at your current status to see if you’re flying; if you’re between legs of a trip; if you’ve just landed; if you’ve got an upcoming return flight, etc. On top of your status is event-based information — are planes late, have you been re-booked. The combination of these may result in a high probability reason for a phone call.

Anticipating intent allows American to offer service without having to present a menu selection. This is very forward-thinking and breaks significant new ground for a phone system.

This is the phone system of the future, here today.

Recently, I was helping out on a project for one of our customers. The customer had on-premise IVRs at multiple call centers with multiple phone numbers from multiple carriers landing at each site.

The customer wanted a CTI-integrated, fully-redundant hosted speech solution to automate just a part of the call flow, with the existing call flows still being serviced by the respective IVRs.

And… all of this in the TDM world!!!

The sheer complexity of the solution boggles the mind. We were discussing crisscrossing tie-lines, bridging calls back-and-forth, with CTI servers at multiple locations. It was just too complicated. Of course, we figured it out, but it’s a very complex solution.

I was fantasizing how much easier things would have been if the IT group was open to (and had justified budget for) a VoIP based solution. Nowadays, even though most IT groups have some plans to roll out VoIP based solutions, many don’t have a comprehensive plan to migrate contact center infrastructure.

An all-IP solution for contact centers comes with the promise of universal routing, pre-treatment of calls, centralized voice portals, reduced infrastructure costs. Imagine not having to deal with terminating circuits, “take back and transfer” costs and expensive CTI infrastructure.

The key thing to remember is that companies must have an enterprise-wide vision to rollout the all-IP solution. In my experience, most companies start-off with a pilot projects with specific purpose and then future projects become dependent on the choices made previously. I have seen VoIP plans getting quickly derailed due to inability of legacy hardware to be upgraded or due to interoperability of the hardware/software choices from various vendors.

To start out on the right foot, it is crucial to align with the right IP open standards at the enterprise level. This will pave the path to the future possibilities via interoperability of newer applications. SIP has been becoming a dominant standard in the VoIP market place. Its popularity can be attributed to lower complexity, higher extensibility and better scalability.

Continue reading ‘Tell Me Again: Why Do I Need VoIP?’

Just this morning, I read an entry on the Customer Service Blog “Customers Are Always” that made a pretty bold claim about having a live customer service answer the phone on the first ring.

Normally, I agree with Maria Palma, and I heartily applaud her for carrying the banner for improving customer service.

However, in this case, I couldn’t disagree more. Here is the quote:

Is it possible to have a live agent answer the call on the first ring? You’re darn right it’s possible!

It is neither possible nor practical to answer every call with a live agent. The reason is simple: Call Volumes.

Just ask 1-800-Flowers.com how many calls they take on February 14th. Or, ask Apple how many iPod calls they receive on the day after Christmas.

In order to have a live agent answer the call on the first ring you would need to have hundreds or thousands of call center agents waiting for calls to come in on that single day. And when no agent is available, what do you get? Music on hold.

If done correctly, automation can (1) handle unpredictable and uneven call volumes and (2) make your existing call center agents more productive. When your customers’ needs are handled quickly and efficiently, they will thank you and they will become repeat customers.

Secrets In Providing Superior Caller Experience

Not too long ago, I picked up a Gartner report on IVR and speech recognition that had some pretty amazing findings.

Not surprisingly, when customers have problems, they immediately reach for the phone (versus going to a website and trying to dig for an answer). But you already knew that.

Much more interesting, though — if wait times are more than two minutes, callers strongly prefer using speech-enabled IVR applications rather than waiting for a representative.

So it seems that speech-enabled IVR systems have found their killer app(s) — the stuff that touchtone systems can’t do, or that normally require agent assistance. Except, um, there aren’t any agents available.

Obvious candidates for speech recognition are things like address change, step-by-step troubleshooting, and open-ended call routing.

Unfortunately, not all speech-enabled IVR applications are created equal. Some are highly frustrating, causing the caller to unnecessarily repeat information or to wade through endless menus before arriving at a place where self-service can finally begin.

So here are a few tips on creating a great caller experience:

1. Make it Conversational

The bottom line is this — in order for speech-enabled systems to deliver a superior caller experience, they must be conversational. That means: let callers ask for what they need, understand their questions and quickly resolve their issues. Oh, and by the way, do it faster than a live agent.

2. Give Control (no, really)

Callers also want to feel in control of the process (I know I do). Every caller should be able to give commands such as wait, go back, next, or (most importantly) live agent!!! at any time. Otherwise, the system is just as bad as the “voice mail jail” systems that are being replaced.

3. Be Different

For competitive reasons, it seems that every company wants to offer differentiated service to their customers. Next generation IVR systems identify certain customers and handle calls according to business logic.

Here’s a great example — understand that an airline passenger is in the middle of a trip, and offer their next flight information proactively. If you haven’t tried it, call the American Airlines “Know Me” application sometime. You will be truly impressed, trust me.

4. Do Your Agents A Favor

Finally, If a caller needs to speak with a live agent, the interaction has got to be productive. The agent should already have access to all the information the caller has provided to the IVR. Nothing is more annoying to a caller than inputting all account information into the system and, after failing to resolve the issue, being routed to an agent who asks for the same information all over again.

Download the rest of the article here.

5 Best Practices In Providing Superior Caller Experience With Speech

Every now and then, I get to work on really great speech-enabled IVR systems, that even callers like to use. Recently, I learned from Telecom New Zealand, the major telephone carrier in a country of about 4 million people, that their callers really like their new system.

Today, Telecom New Zealand provides millions of subscribers with local dial tone, plus long distance service, plus Internet service, plus mobile services, plus a variety of other value-added services.

So it stands to reason, their subscribers are calling for a myriad of product offerings and for a multitude of reasons.

After adding more and more items to their touch-tone system, they started to get the feeling that their touch-tone menu system just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

So, how did they handle this problem? They implemented a conversational call routing speech system. The results were really stunning:

• The number of callers that “zero out” dropped to almost nothing
• Customer satisfaction with speech is three times greater than with the old touch-tone IVR
• Huge jump in CSR efficiency due to reduced re-work and misroutes

Here is an interesting article that appeared on Destination CRM, entitled Chatting Up Customers Down Under.