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.
Great article, Laura! I think you nailed it.