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The Voice-Empowered Contact Center BY
DANIEL MILLER AND MARK PLAKIAS
What do Amtrak, ABN Amro, BellSouth Telecommunications, Delta Airlines,
GMAC, OfficeDepot, Sears, T. Rowe Price, Travelocity, and Verizon all have
in common? They’re all household brands with major call center
operators; and they’ve all invested in automated speech recognition
(ASR) systems and services in the past year. Most of their implementations
fall into the tried-and-true vertical markets that have paved the way in
ASR over the past few years — travel, telecom, and financial services,
which have been the pioneers in this market. Increasingly, however, the
interactive voice response (IVR) and ASR development teams in these
verticals have been more tightly integrated with Web-based operations.
THE CHAIN, THE CHANNEL, AND THE ECONOMY
Contact centers are about as mission-critical as any IT or
telecommunications resource in a business enterprise. They are at the
front line of customer contact and play crucial roles in order entry and
order processing. Contact centers also have “hooks” or technical
interfaces into the most sensitive databases on an enterprise’s network.
Increasingly, organizations are recognizing the value of voice
interfaces in the contact center. But despite recent advances, such as
those mentioned above, the adoption and deployment of ASR, text-to-speech
(TTS), and natural language understanding (NLU) is moving more sluggishly
than technology providers would like. Clearly the slow uptake is partly
attributable to the current economy, in which many IT projects are being
deferred. Yet there are also other factors, including:
- Overly-complex value chains.
- Difficulty getting the attention of important sales and distribution
channels.
- Customer concern about flash-cuts to mission-critical applications.
- A paucity of ready-to-go applications that plug high-volume call
streams into enterprise business processes.
- A political minefield involving defenders of entrenched call center
legacies versus reluctant dragons within IT organizations capable of
generating VoiceXML code.
While nobody can control the economy, the issues listed above are very
real. They need to be addressed to crack the enterprise market in general
and the contact center market specifically.
All too often, ASR developers have focused on overly simplified ROI
models based on agent displacement. Even in instances where these
displacement economics apply (and there are many), the issues listed above
must be addressed before the renovation of telephone self-service can
begin on a massive scale.
ASR developers and adherents need to recognize the opportunity to use
voice processing technologies to enhance the user experience and stop
looking at the simplistic comparison of automated speech versus live agent
interaction costs. Why? Because the cost structure and work flows
surrounding that agent have extended beyond a simple phone call. So, for
that matter, has self-service.
HELPING THOSE WHO HELP THEMSELVES
It is important to put ASR in the context of the full scope of “self-service”
technologies. These days, when contact center managers talk about
self-service, they could be talking about IVR, ASR, fax, or the Web.
Adding tasks for agents to perform — e-mail handling, text chat,
escorted browsing, and application sharing — has impacted several core
processes fundamental to any contact center including scheduling agents,
reporting on their activities, delivering content, and routing contacts
among agents.
These activities may have no direct impact on self-service functions,
but they factor into contact center costs and metrics. Web-based
multimedia contact technology has already had a disruptive effect on
legacy call center core processes, including workforce management, call
routing, reporting systems, and content management.
Experienced call center managers have been forced to look beyond their
“pet” metrics of agent productivity, ACD capacity, and contact
management in order to take into account the fact that a single “contact”
can span many days and involve several channels, agents, or information
resources distributed around the world.
What can we take away from all this? Voice developers seeking to
recalibrate the agent workloads need to understand the total cost picture,
as well as the multimedia contact technologies that are also affecting the
contact center organization’s infrastructure. If an ASR application,
with the help of NLU, completes a transaction without agent assistance,
for example, that event needs to be fed into the connected processes of
reporting, scheduling, routing, and content creation.
This is particularly challenging in the case of ASR, because it
represents its own set of integration issues. Even before assessing how it
plugs into recording, workforce management, and basic reporting systems,
ASR implementers have to juggle a number of components within the voice
recognition solution to make it all work smoothly. Fortunately, most of
these pieces have existing legacy analogs that can serve as a point of
departure, making the roadmap clear, and pulling along investments already
in the ground.
TWO EVOLUTIONARY PATHS
We are entering the fourth decade of contact center evolution. In the
beginning, there was little more to work with than ACDs handling PSTN
circuits, mainframe applications, and dumb terminals, which served up text
forms to agents wearing headsets. During the 30-plus years since the
introduction of ACDs, they have been supplanted first by software-driven
PBXs and then by communications servers with “appliances” to handle
touchtone, voice, and XML-based sessions.
Minicomputers replaced mainframes, which in turn were supplanted by PCs
and eventually blades that were driven by CTI middleware. Yet the most
dramatic leap, at least from the end-user point of view, is taking place
in the self-service continuum.
Interactive voice response units were introduced in the 1970s. They
served as auto-attendants or responded to very simple queries (emulating
dumb terminals). While terminals got slightly smarter or were supplanted
by PCs and workstations, IVR systems persevered with little change until
the introduction of “media servers” at the dawn of the new millennium.
There were rudimentary ASR-based apps, rising to popularity in the
mid-1990s, but the great leap forward is yet to come.
SKIP TO M’LU
This high-level view puts two scenarios for future deployment into
high-relief. The first is to treat ASR as a legacy upgrade (LU) because
installations will be built on the back of existing IVR platforms. This
scenario will be driven by the growing demand to deliver more self-service
applications over the phone, and the realization that the IVR touchtone
interface can no longer support large menus and complex applications.
Some important applications fall in the LU category. Amtrak fits this
description. Its Schedules & Fares touchtone application is a maze of
steps, and yet represents a natural for ASR. With over five million calls
a year going to its VRUs today, the conversion of Amtrak’s IVR to ASR,
now underway, will expose a significant amount of consumers to the
technology.
THE WEB-FACING ALTERNATIVE
The second template that comes out of the roadmap is the extension of
Web-facing assets, such as the core application servers supporting
self-service on the Web. Recent implementations across several of the core
vertical markets — ABN Amro for Financial Services, and Lastminute.com
within the travel vertical — show the basis for ASR deployment coming
from Web platforms, not IVR.
In the case of ABN Amro, an example of outsourcing using service from
NetByTel, a group of developers within its Mortgage.com subsidiary were
instrumental in creating an ASR-based hosted solution that screened a
tidal wave of calls for refinancing that emerged earlier this year as a
result of declining interest rates.
By automating the eligibility screening process and finding a way to
let callers know whether refinancing would (or would not) save them money
on their monthly mortgage payments, ABN Amro (working with NetByTel) was
able to free live agents to engage in productive inbound and outbound
interactions with qualified mortgage customers. Agents freed from dealing
with a surge from 7,000 inquiries per month to 30,000 inquiries were able
to achieve a 60 percent conversion rate on the pre-qualified ASR
prospects. That drove $100,000 in additional revenue in the first 30 days
of deployment.
In the case of Lastminute.com, the largest online discount travel
broker in Europe, there was no legacy IVR. The company wanted to try some
cross-media development and deployed ASR as the order capture line behind
an old-fashioned hard copy catalog of various gift items. Lastminute.com’s
internal Web programming group worked with a voice hosting team from BT
Syncordia, VUI experts from Nuance, and Periphonics voice gateway
specialists to put together a solution in 12 weeks. Key elements of the
platform included:
- One hundred percent voice-automated shopping service.
- Pick from catalogue and/or audio browse.
- Virtual-shopping basket.
- Credit card interface.
- Category and product browsing interface.
- Full postcode handling module (ZIP code=NW1 4PE).
- Personal greeting message to attach to gift.
- Context-sensitive help, terms and conditions, etc.
- Confirmation by SMS, invoice by e-mail and postal mail.
What Lastminute.com’s Web team found was profoundly encouraging.
While the process was not simple — a complete order consisted of 23
distinct steps — the average order, measured in terms of number of items
in the shopping basket checked out, was higher than the Web. And by using
a NICE logging platform in conjunction with the ASR app, Lastminute.com
also found that the ability to track customer movements and intents was
much more granular than the Web. This is because voice browsing and
searching is much more linear, of course.
Finally, given the company’s multiple server farms spread across the
North American and European communities, VoiceXML-based implementations
become a natural for SIP-connected voice gateways. The company operates a
distributed platform and the media resources to run a central application
that connects local phone networks via the Internet.
WHAT’S THE BOTTOM LINE ON ASR?
The applications cited make it clear that a superior, automated voice
user interface will improve customer satisfaction by suppressing both
abandoned calls and so-called “hostile transfers” to live operators
from frustrated callers struggling with complex touchtone interfaces.
However legacy upgrades or extensions of Web-facing apps, ASR, TTS, and
ultimately VoiceXML (or its equivalent) will converge to more elegantly
blend Internet based resources, IVR systems, and live agents, the result
will be improved contact center profitability, closely linked to an
improved customer experience and heightened satisfaction. Automated speech
can reduce lost calls, enable agents to upsell, and provide great service.
As we see it, client retention and enhanced revenue opportunities — not
agent replacement — will deliver strong ROI.
Daniel Miller is senior vice president and managing director,
marketing and media group, for The Kelsey Group. Mark Plakias is senior
vice president and managing director, communications and infrastrucure
group for The Kelsey Group. For more information, visit www.kelseygroup.com.
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