In it, Sharma talks about the future of speech and how humans are (and will be) interacting with technology.  A good read!

Apparently, some wireless carriers are also breaking up with their customers — if they call too often.

Check out Sprint Drops Customers Who Call for Help Too Often on NPR from July 11th:

Day to Day, July 11, 2007 · Cell phone service provider Sprint is dropping some of its customers who frequently called customer service with problems. The company sent letters to about a thousand customers telling them it was time to move on to another provider.

What is also interesting is the shocked and stunned reaction of the dumped customers on the Sprint Users Discussion Board.

Back in August, I posed the question:

Are their systems and business processes just too knotted up to deliver proactive customer service?

Or, do they just take their customers for granted?

I’m starting to think there is a third option: they see their customers as a nuisance.

Let’s assume your call center takes one million calls per month, your IVR is offered 30% of those and completes half. Let’s also assume that a call completed in automation saves your operation $1.00 per call.

A speech application which improves your call completion rate in your IVR by ten percent will yield a total additional saving of $360,000 per year — not bad.

But what could happen if you apply the same efforts to improving your routing experience? If a natural language routing interface can increase the calls offered to your IVR by the same 10%, your return almost doubles to $600,000.

The math works because fixing the top of the funnel has a multiple effect over tinkering with the bottom. Now that the cost of Natural Language call routing is on par with other applications, clearly routing is the biggest bang for your buck.

Now, if you take the same scenario and combine a 10% increase in calls offered from a natural language routing application with the 10% increase in call completion from your world class automated speech application, the total saving becomes $1,080,000.

This number approaches the ROI you enjoyed when you first implemented your old IVR, but that’s not the biggest benefit. Natural language routing allows twelve million (as apposed to 180,000) of your customers to receive a better caller experience regardless of whether the call is ultimately automated or handed off to a customer service agent. Done right, this positive experience will give your company the opportunity to associate your brand with 12 million more positive experiences every year.

You might be thinking a call routing approach has ten thousand more opportunities for something bad to happen. You could be right, but that same line of reasoning could have been used when you opened up your first call center. Not having a call center was not an option because you would eventually lose customers if they couldn’t get the information they wanted via the phone.

Now the bar has been raised and the same principle applies: you will eventually lose customers by not allowing convenient and timely access to the information callers require.

Read the next article in this series

If your operation is like most call centers, you probably had someone responsible for your ACD routing and someone else designing your IVR. Maybe there’s a third person who has developed the CSR procedures for handling calls. The caller doesn’t view this as three separate experiences, so why shouldn’t you also be viewing the entire encounter from ‘hello’ to ‘goodbye’?

Here’s part of the problem in not taking a holistic view:

If you’ve decided to create the most compelling speech application known to man, and stick it underneath a DTMF driven routing application, you may still be forcing callers to navigate through six DTMF menus before they’re exposed to your world class application. So, you’ve already lost most callers before they hear the first “how can I help you”.

You’d literally be building a treasure for improving efficiency and satisfaction and burying it under six feet of dirt, leaving your callers with an arcane treasure map. There isn’t a caller in the world (other than Paul English and gethuman.com) who wants to take the time to learn your call navigation schema.

Perhaps the map is as important as the treasure? I’d argue that the map is a great deal more important and here’s why:

The promise of voice self-service is not the elimination of touch-tone (yes, you read that right). It’s the eradication of menus, and these menus negatively affect a great deal more callers at the top of your application than they do at the bottom.

Read the next article in this series.

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 ‘Know 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.