Archive for the 'callcenter automation' Category

Maximize customer satisfaction AND maximize automation

Published
by
Nick Ezzo
on October 16, 2008
in callcenter automation and caller experience
. 0 Comments

Nick Ezzo

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!

Time Customer Service Earns Fifth Consecutive Speech Award for TuVox

Published
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Nick Ezzo
on October 6, 2008
in awards and callcenter automation
. 0 Comments

Nick Ezzo 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.”

Kaizen for Customer Service Speech Applications

Published
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Nitin Shroff
on July 29, 2008
in callcenter automation
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Kaizen is the Japanese word for “a change for the better” (”kai” means “change” and “zen” means “good”), which results in “continuous improvement”.  (1)

Striving for excellence, always looking for ways to improve what already exists, and believing that one can impact change, is at the heart of the Kaizen spirit.

Speech applications life-cycle management is essentially a Kaizen methodology. Tuning – continuous improvement can have a significant impact on the caller experience and adoption of speech automation for customer service. For maximum effectiveness, tuning should included detailed analysis of the application performance using live caller data. In applying Kaizen to speech applications, we need to consider:

  1. Areas of the speech application where improvements can be beneficial – Particular attention should be paid to the dialog states that occur early on in the application, as it is these states that receive the most traffic and therefore provide the greatest opportunity for improving the overall performance of the application.  Also, a detailed analysis of the entire call flow (speech automation business process) will reveal hot spots that need attention
  2. Speech application statistics – including call volume, uptake rate, zero out rate (DTMF, speech), abandon rate, recognition rate, completion rate, caller satisfaction and others
  3. Sources for the statistics – Logging mechanisms used to record the callers’ inputs and to collect information such as the recognition results, call volume statistics, the status of barge-in and many others

Typically, Kaizen applied to customer service speech applications will include:

  1. Dialog Tuning – includes the changes to the call flow and to the audio recordings. The scope of dialog tuning may include wording changes, navigational restructuring, or re-recording with different pacing or intonation. For example, analysis of data from a speech application that shows too many zero-outs on the first menu itself may indicate that the callers are confused by the menu choices and may require breaking down the call flow into nested menus of questions with yes/no choices.
  2. Recognition tuning – includes grammar modifications as well as adjustments to the recognition parameters. Grammar tuning requires a thorough analysis of the spoken utterances, incorporating factors such as misrecognitions and out-of-grammar utterances. Recognition parameters include phonetic dictionaries, grammar probabilities and confidence thresholds

Kaizen – the methodology for continuous improvement comes naturally to all speech applications. In addition to the concrete results of improved efficiency and effectiveness, the biggest benefit from speech applications and Kaizen is the culture of continuous improvement. As the benefits of speech applications such as increased efficiency by improved automation rates and increased effectiveness by increased consistency and accuracy of responses are observed and appreciated, one can expect Kaizen to be adopted into other areas of customer service business processes such as the mid-office and back-office.  With Kaizen, change management is now easier – leading to a virtuous, continuous cycle of business performance improvement.

(1) “The Meaning of Kaizen” - Kaizen Consulting Group

Don’t touch-tone and drive: Just speak it!

Published
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Nitin Shroff
on July 21, 2008
in callcenter automation and caller experience
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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!”

Did We “Get Human” Yet?

Published
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Nick Ezzo
on April 3, 2008
in VUI, callcenter automation, caller experience and podcast
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icon for podpress  Did We "Get Human" Yet? [1:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Nick EzzoThe 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.

Is the end of the contact center labor arbitrage in sight?

Published
by
Steve Pollock
on November 6, 2007
in callcenter automation
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steve-pollock.gifThere’s been a long-standing trend in the contact center industry that’s been at the center of cost reduction.

Specifically I’m referring to “labor arbitrage”: The process of substituting lower cost labor from other geographies.

This global phenomenon has gone through some unique phases:

  • Lower-cost in-country resources
  • Outsourcing to specialist firms
  • Lower-cost cross-border resources

The economics behind this process have been extremely compelling for contact center managers. That said, from my recent conversations with executives, I have gotten the distinct impression that the arbitrage has slowed down or even stopped. Some companies have clearly pushed as much labor as they can across borders.

I was wondering how this looked at a global scale, and so I did a little analysis.

Datamonitor, a leading analyst firm that covers contact center agents and technologies, shows continued growth at about a 4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in agent positions worldwide. (For you math geeks who want to check out my calculation, here are the raw numbers - 2007: 7.9M; 2008: 8.2M; 2009: 8.6M; 2010 8.9M).

Now the comparison. Datamonitor shows that the CAGR for outsourced positions is dropping substantially for the

U.S.: 2006-2008: 15% vs. 2008-2010: 5%. That’s a huge shift in the rate of change of the rate of change (yes calculus fans, that’s the second derivative! Mr. Piatt, my math teacher, will be so pleased!). But what does it mean?My take: this validates what I’m hearing from executives. What we’re seeing is that most of the “labor arbitrage” that can be achieved has been ‘squeezed out’ of the system. It appears that the remaining positions can’t be taken across borders for structural reasons (legal/privacy restrictions, customer service quality concerns – real or perceived, availability of skills, management overhead, rising cost of labor globally, etc.).

Says Spock, eyebrow raised: intriguing.

Our perspective is the continued cost pressures faced by contact centers will turn to other fronts. In particular, this will continue to accelerate the adoption of self-service technologies, including kiosk, web self service, and of course voice self-service.

Congratulations, Telecom!

Published
by
Steve Pollock
on October 26, 2007
in callcenter automation
. 0 Comments

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.

Branding 101 - Don’t forget the phone channel

Published
by
Laura Bramschreiber
on July 25, 2007
in callcenter automation
. 0 Comments

Laura

The Oft Forgotten Phone Channel

Try this: go to any shopping mall and take a good look around. Look at the storefronts, the carefully arranged displays, the beautiful people hawking perfumes. A visual feast of delights to assault your senses and make you a true believer… in the brand.

Then call the 800 numbers for these same companies and that’s usually when the needle scratches off the record.

Companies obsess over maximizing the value of every customer touch point and yet, most of them miss the opportunity to engage their customers on a brand level through the phone channel. I would go one step further and say a large portion of these companies have 800 numbers that actual repel customers. The Website Touchtone Hell chronicles some of the most repellent 800 numbers around.

According to a recent article by the Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA), more than half of support issues are initiated by phone. So, it’s hard to believe companies would intentionally ignore the phone channel. And yet, most callers are still tortured by long hold times, confusing touch-tone menus and repeatedly told to visit a company’s website.

But alas, a glimmer of hope… A handful of companies have figured it out. Companies like American Airlines, Apple and USAA are actually extending their brands through the phone channel with personalized and often proactive service. For example, with the American Airlines ‘Remember Me’ program (see my June 21st comment), the company knows who the caller is and why they’re calling, before they ever speak a word.

In a world where touch-tone hell is still the norm, it’s refreshing when you actually do business with a company that has customer service continuity, whether that service is provided at the ticket counter, on the jet way, or by phone. There are a ton of retail and other companies who would do well to follow the American Airlines lead and invest as much in telephone self-service as they do on storefronts.