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?

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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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In my last article, I put forward the idea that the best way to improve your caller experience is by fixing your call routing and eliminating touch-tone menus. Now, let me give you the economics behind this approach.

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

Why is it that when businesses think of applying speech technology to their organization, their first thought is about replacing touch-tone IVR applications, some of which may be functioning perfectly well?

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.