What About Internet Telephony?

While it is true that live audio/video Internet products are out there, in the customer service environment (that is, in call centers), these products are almost never implemented. At the present time, Internet telephony is not a factor in this arena, and quality of service is just one of the many good reasons.


Web/call center combinations are being used in pilot applications, and often they incorporate a “call me” button on the Web page that brings the customer into the call center for a telephony interaction in parallel with what’s going on over the Web. More often than not, these things initiate an outbound call to a customer-entered telephone number.


The problem implementing IP-telephony based service has less to do with the network’s quality of service issues than it does with the way calls are routed into the center (the ACD has to be able to send it to the right agent, and queue it, and report on it) and with the human issues of how customers wish to get their service. In nearly all cases, the telephone is the instrument of choice for service delivery, despite the availability of a Web alternative.


One vendor, CosmoCom, is making a go of an IP-based virtual call center system that blends traditional voice telephone calls with live Internet sessions. It manages and distributes both live calls and messages, including voice, fax, and email.


CosmoCall supports fully distributed operation with remote agents and multiple site operation transparently through its IP backbone that transports voice and data. It includes a multiple chat capability that lets CSRs conduct several concurrent text-based chats, while simultaneously speaking with their customers over the telephone or the Internet.


With CosmoCall, visitors to an ecommerce website can click a link to establish a live multimedia connection to a customer service representative. CosmoCall queues the calls, selects the right kind of representative for each caller, and informs each representative about the nature and context of the call.


And on another front, Dialogic recently demonstrated an interface between Internet telephony and CTI applications. This gatekeeper-based technology will extend the capabilities of Dialogic’s CT Connect call control software. According to theory, applications will be able to monitor and control IP telephony calls in the same way they currently do in traditional telephone environments.


This new technology will allow CTI applications to operate within IP telephony environments as easily as a traditional PBX. This transparency between IP telephony and traditional PBXs means that CTI developers will be able to market their applications for use in IP telephony environments with little or no change.


Customers will then be able to use IP telephony in conjunction with contact management, customer service, and support applications: in other words, in call centers.


In a standards-based IP telephony environment, the gatekeeper is the focal point of enhanced call processing because endpoints within its domain consult it whenever a connection is set up, torn down, or changed. During call setup, for example, a gatekeeper handles functions such as bandwidth allocation, address translation, access permission, and call routing.

The Web & Call Centers

When the first edition of this book was published, not that many years ago, the idea of a connection between the Internet and call centers was theoretical, and not very well thought out. The most common way of thinking about the issue was to imagine self-support applications: literally, email-based posting of customer support cases, and the ability of a customer to search a database of problems and solutions by themselves.

Just a few years ago, it was possible to talk about the different ways of delivering customer service without mentioning online support at all. When you did mention it, it was in the context of CompuServe forums or company-sponsored bulletin board systems. The Internet explosion that’s brought us webpages was still a year or so in the future. That’s how fast things have changed.

A call center is not a place. It is a set of functions. It is the process of selling to people who are not in the room with you. And of serving their many varied needs. A call center’s primary function is to create and keep customers.

Right now, that function requires a physical presence, a location — an actual set of seats filled with people to help customers. Agents that have access to stores of data about the customers and the company, and the points of intersection. These people act as gatekeepers for the two-directional flow of information — as intermediaries and interpreters.

What if those functions could be accomplished without people? Or with a vastly fewer number of people, so that those who are left are true experts who add value to the transaction, and who don’t merely funnel that transaction along.

This is the goal experts are reaching toward when they tout the Web as a useful adjunct to the call center — the promise of a workforce deployed in exactly the way that is most useful and efficient. Customers who solve their own problems, who in essence sell themselves, and a specially trained cadre of agents dedicated to doing what only humans can do.

To some extent, the call center industry has been flirting with this notion for years, with varying degrees of success. First there was fax, then fax-on-demand. Want information about our company at 2 am? Rather than pay to staff off-hours, make information available for retrieval by the customer himself. It’s fast, cheap and gets generally high satisfaction marks from the customers.

On the other hand, some of the lessons learned by newer ecommerce and etailing (hate those words) companies haven’t yet been taken to heart. As a benchmarking survey commissioned by Swallow Information Systems has revealed, organizations are turning a blind eye to customer complaints and not treating inquiries seriously.

The survey found that 93% of companies in the business-to-consumer marketplace gather customer data, but only a third convert opinions into improved customer-led policies. 89% use the Internet as their prime way of contacting customers, but most have no procedure for resolving online complaints and inquiries, and over 25% have no dedicated customer service policy at all.

The survey was conducted across 28 companies, including SOCAP (The Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals) members, blue chips and market leaders, including retail, telecom, travel & leisure, financial services, FMCG and manufacturing industries.

The research suggests that the problem is caused by a ‘quick-fix’ approach to complaint resolution, where staff members find a solution then move on to another task, rather than upgrading the service for every customer. Another key cause cited was a lack of awareness of the technologies available to receive and respond to customer contacts, and how customer information can be shared between departments.

“It’s alarming that companies are underestimating the value of their customers to such a degree,” said Ros Gardner, vice president at SOCAP UK. “The customer is an organization’s most important resource, and they should be aware that listening to their opinions is one of the best indicators of success or failure, and where improvements should be made.”

“Companies are projecting an image of good service, but too often customers are being ignored,” said Bill Bostridge, VP of sales at Swallow Information Systems. “Providing a channel for customers to contact you is the first step to good service, but collecting data without listening to their opinions is a pointless exercise. Managing customer contacts is the key to turning around services that customers actually want and need.”

Then there’s IVR. It’s great for routing calls to agents, shortening call times, getting people into the right queue, etc. But it also allows people to self-serve for simple database lookups like an account balance, an order confirmation or shipping status. Or to diagnose a technical problem.

But still, there is an unstoppable trend toward providing an automated response to customer interactions. The reasons are clear:

Automated responses are cheaper than agent-provided ones.

They are always the same for all callers. Two people who call for directions from the airport to your office won’t get different routes from different reps.

Automation is always available, even when you’re closed.

Of course, there is a downside. Some people miss the personal touch. And any problem or question not planned for in the rules-based structures of your system requires human intervention anyway.

The Web is the third advance in self-serve automation. It has many of the advantages of fax — it’s a dynamic, easy-to-maintain format. It is available to huge numbers of potential customers. And it surpasses fax or IVR in one critical area: it has enormous multimedia capabilities (sound, graphics, video, and more). It is rich in the one quality IVR lacks — the ability to control applications that require visual presentation or extensive keyboard output, or both.

Customers can order products. They can download software. They can read catalogs.

Clearly there is a need for alternate points of entry into the call center. You can think of the call center as the focal point of a “customer contact zone” where a lot of

interactions take place. Ultimately, as more kinds of call center applications are developed that bypass the agent, a given customer will have more choices for entering the zone and concluding the interaction. Some points of entry may be better for making a sale — document retrieval by fax-back, for example. Others are better for customer support, like IVR.

The Web offers an amalgamation of these techniques. Where the Web first began to take hold was with help desks. These smaller centers, already strained by escalating call volumes, were in the vanguard of agent-enhancement technology. Problem resolution software frees technical experts from the drudgery of answering repetitive questions, letting them get to the business of solving more complex problems. It puts them in a position to add value to the customer transaction, rather than merely pipeline a piece of existing information to the customer.

But what about other call center systems like ACDs? If a caller has a choice of how to get into that customer contact zone, where will the switch fit in?

The answer has turned out to be twofold.

First, there is the omnipresent email. (Itself a revolution in communications technology; if it weren’t for the fact that the Web has pictures and sounds, we would be marveling at the amazing transformation email has wrought in our society.) In call centers just the last two years has brought something that’s sometimes called the “Internet ACD” or “Email ACD.” Bad terms, but they do describe fairly well what’s going on.

What they do is perform the same types of targeted routing that the telephony switch does for calls. They take large volumes of email as it comes in, parses out some form of meaning (who is the sender, what is the subject, etc.), determines whether it can be answered with an automated response, and if not, sends it along to someone who can handle it in an effective way. Routing tables show whom can handle what, and how often.

These systems also track and audit the response to those emails. So you can set an organizational parameter, for example, that all emails have to be “handled” within a certain timeframe.

The other major thrust has been a tentative exploration of one of the Web’s major attractions, which is live chat. The idea being that a customer visiting your webpage would click on a button to initiate a text chat window, having a semi-real-time conversation with a rep back at the call center through a text typing session.

There are several advantages to this. One is that a single rep can handle multiple chat sessions at once, because many of the responses can be automated. (One vendor showed me a system where a rep could handle six at once — a recipe for burnout and turnover if ever there was one.) The other advantage is that it is relatively simple technology, that connects it to a rep’s desk, in contrast to the much more complicated Web callback systems that attempt to connect a Web surfer to a call center through an actual telephony connection.

As you would expect, vendors are closely watching Internet technologies, looking for ways to integrate their switches with Web-enabled applications. As one manufacturer suggested, it is when the consumer can (and does) cherrypick from a combination of entry points — fax, email, Web or voice call — and expects to switch from one mode to another during a single “interaction” that advanced ACDs will need to be tightly integrated with the Internet.

What will happen is that human interaction will be reserved for where the agents can add the most value.

Speech Rec: The Gateway to CRM?

A lot of attention has been focused lately on the pros and cons of CRM tools — much from the point of view of “which tool can I buy and what is it going to do for me?” One of the things that’s been overlooked is that for CRM to function properly, it needs to receive constant, meaningful input from an outside system. Input that acts as the raw meat for its real work, which is the analysis of what the customer wants and whether he got it.

We’re used to thinking of two main data inputs from the customer. One, IVR, has been around forever and is widely understood. There are not too many new ways to construct a branching tree routing script, or to parse an incoming account number. Application development for IVR has been made easy enough for an intelligent non-expert to do a credible job putting together working, useful apps.

The other input mode is the very rich, multi-textured Web interface. This has developed so recently that there are many techniques for feeding customer input from a website through to a CRM system and into a contact center. All the many data-gathering and connection modes fall into this camp: email, click-to-call, text chat, and Web-based ecommerce forms.

Almost off the radar, though, is another technology that has reached strong maturity. Speech recognition, which is making big waves out in the consumer technology world, is still seen as something of an afterthought in the CRM/contact center world. In fact, it’s a lot more than just a replacement for touch-tone input.

Why is it different? I’d like to argue that it creates the opportunity for a completely different type of interaction than does IVR. IVR, despite having “interactive” as part of its name, is really a one-way channel. Customers enter ID and pull out a small subset of data that pertains to them. Remember why it caught on in the first place: it automated the dumping of small bits of repetitive info to the caller, keeping those calls away from expensive agents. Relatively low tech, profoundly efficient, easy to diagram into an existing call flow — the very definition of no-brainer.

But when you add speech to the same call, you add several orders of complexity. Forget about the complexity of the tech that you need to operate it; instead, concentrate on the complexity of the information flow back and forth between you and the customers. Instead of asking questions that get answered only in numeric digits, you can draw out responses that are far more nuanced and subtle. Few people are going to enter an address using keys that have three letters apiece. Asking for a stock quote using the Schwab IVR is hard enough — each letter of the alphabet is assigned a two key code. They had to send customers little wallet cards to remind them of the alphabetic cipher just to be able to retrieve stock quotes. This was in 1996, before they were heavily online, and before they installed a speech rec system.

Stock quotes are one of those really basic information retrieval apps that the Web does really well as a replacement for the phone system. But you can do things that are so much richer, limited only by the system resources available to parse the speech, and the power of the recognition engine.

SpeechWorks, one of the companies with powerful speech rec tools, says that to run high-quality speech applications, you need four things:

§  state-of-the-art technology;

§  high-level building blocks (essentially this means that the recognition engine contains prefabricated modules for handling certain types of speech);

§  tight integration on robust telephony platforms; and

§  tools for analyzing and tuning applications.

That’s to make the speech rec work; to make the application it’s running a success as well, you also need

§  appropriate application development procedures;

§  an understanding of what your app is ultimately supposed to do for you, in terms of what would make it a success; and

§  a good user interface.

SpeechWorks says that based on several of their customer installs, the average cost of an agented call per minute is $1.50; by contrast the average cost of a speech-rec attended call is just $0.25-$0.35. That’s not too surprising, and they rightly say that the speech-rec costs vary based on the underlying contract the call center has with its local telcos for long distance traffic.

At one of their installations, the length of customer interactions was reduced from 12.5 minutes through touch tone to two to three minutes using speech. This goes right to the question of speech rec as a rough equivalent to IVR. If anything like that reduction can be repeated across the board, or even in a significant minority of applications, then speech looks a lot better as a way into the database despite the higher level of technology it needs to implement.

From a call flow and design point of view, though, it would be a mistake to think of speech rec as “talking IVR.” When I speak of a richer interaction, I mean this: you don’t have to delineate options one through four and leave the person scratching his head to figure out where his particular problem fits into your schema. The sophisticated application will acknowledge that there are ambiguities of response, and will tailor prompts to try to zero in on what the customer needs without being as linear as IVR.

People who are expert at using the system can shortcut through it, for example, or can barge in (that is, talk while the system is talking and have it know that it should stop and listen).

Those points apply to the IVR/speech rec comparison, which is how you look at speech rec when its main purpose is to identify the person and route to the right agent. But again, the interaction can be richer, used to gather information that you didn’t have already. Once you’ve used the system to identify the caller, you can ask questions that have more detailed answers, even questions that are tailored to a particular audience or context. The stronger the speech rec engine, the more you’ll be able to parse out of what a caller says. Again, its strength in the long run is not going to be that it gets the information to the caller at a lower cost; rather, it’s going to be that it gets information from the caller to you in a more meaningful and spontaneous way. It’s easier to say something into a phone than it is to fill out a survey and mail it back, or even to fill out a form on a website.

When I look at the spectrum of CRM-style applications that are rolling out over the next two years (and it’s a long list), the common element is the need for an information channel that brings information reliably from the customer inside the company. We’re used to customers calling when they want something, and parsing the data that comes with the call is so old-hat it’s never even mentioned anymore. We’re quickly getting used to customers using email and Web for interactions.

In a conversation with a very smart Dictaphone executive recently, it was opined that we’re moving inexorably to a point where all transactions are recorded, stored, and analyzed using advanced data mining techniques. He was speaking from the point of view of quality assurance and agent performance, as well as customer satisfaction measurement. It strikes me that if universal recording and archival does arrive, the collection of speech rec data, added to the analysis, could be a valuable (if a bit spooky) addition.

CRM, so much a buzzword now, is an idea that stands in for a range of future technologies, some of which will catch on and some of which won’t. It’s the theory that matters, that information flows freely between all systems and is parsed somewhere inside the organization, probably away from the call center. The theory of CRM will depend on controlling the most customer information at the lowest cost. Right now it seems that speech recognition has a good shot at replacing IVR as the primary information gathering tool for phone-only interactions.

Financial Services Out In Front | Speech Recognition

Visa International is betting that “v-commerce,” the heinously-named catch-all term for telephone transactions enhanced by speech-recognition, is a big part of their future. 

Since 1995, Visa International has been an investor in Nuance, and has participated in pilot programs to add automated speech to cardholder transactions — basic things like card activation, card replacement, and travel planning.

These are things that, like all good IVR apps, don’t need an agent for the basic, introductory information gathering stage of the transaction. Only when things get more complicated, or the consumer gets confused and tries to bail on the automated system, does an agent really become necessary.

Now Visa and Nuance are working on developing apps for use by the member banks for customers to self-serve over the phone. It’s got some important names from the call center field, but it doesn’t have any speech companies other than Nuance. Nuance’s speech rec is as good as anyone’s, but it’s not the only one, so the impact of an association like this is in the power of the end-users, like Visa, to push a particular technology.

Several v-commerce applications are currently available for Visa member banks including speech banking and automated bill payment.

Another really interesting real-world application of speech rec is the installation that went into Ameritrade (the brokerage firm) in early 2000. Ameritrade decided to take their existing (and recently installed) speech rec front-end and expand its capacity.

Ameritrade’s system lets their brokerage customers check their accounts and act on their investment decisions via telephone using natural speech recognition. The speech-enabled system was introduced to Ameritrade customers on March 10, 2000, and handled more than 650,000 calls in its first nine trading days. That huge response was a major factor in Ameritrade’s recent decision to increase the port capacity of its InterVoice-Brite call automation system. The expansion is planned for this month.

Since the speech-enabled system was implemented, Ameritrade’s call completion volume has significantly increased. The system currently handles an average of more than 85,000 calls on trading days. More than 40% of callers are already opting to use the speech recognition capabilities. This self-service transaction option gives Ameritrade customers a faster, more convenient method for rapid stock transactions while enabling the company to increase the efficiency of its call center by reducing call wait times and freeing agents to process more complex customer service requests.

The system isn’t pure-speech only; rather, their call flow involves an interesting hybrid of traditional user-entered touch tone digits and speech input. To use the self-service stock trading system, callers enter their account code and personal identification number, using traditional keypad entry. Then, the system asks for which stock the caller would like a transaction. Rather than using a tedious touch-tone entry method, callers speak the company name or stock symbol in a natural voice.

It runs on InterVoice-Brite’s OneVoice platform and uses technology from SpeechWorks. The system’s vocabulary exceeds 60,000 words and even recognizes popular stock nicknames, such as “Big Blue” for IBM. (Though I believe you’d have to be really wanting in common sense to actually try to trade stock using that kind of nickname.)

InterVoice-Brite has also put in speech-enabled stock systems for DMG & Partners Securities, Lim and Tan Securities, Keppel Securities in Singapore, and Hyundai Securities in Korea.

The system will be able to interpret more than 80% of first and last names in the United States. That’s going to make the system more viable for applications like health insurance benefits verification, travel reservation verification and cancellation, and inquiry applications where callers are asked to leave their name and number for an informational callback.

New multilingual capabilities simultaneously support two or more languages on a single system. These multilingual capabilities will enable application developers to create self-service applications in 10 different languages. Callers can also respond to prompts in their own dialect depending on geographic location and regional demographics.

Languages supported now include English (US, UK, Australian and Singaporean), Spanish (Latin and US), French (European and Canadian), Chinese (Mandarin) and German. The system features a vocabulary with more than 70,000 words and supports an increased number of ports to support higher call volumes. Additional tools include custom vocabulary development, industry-specific grammar libraries and a self-tuning feature.

Speech Recognition

With almost no fanfare, speech recognition technology has made tremendous strides in the last few years. It’s what you might call a stealth technology — the kind that keep academics and serious R&D departments busy for years showing incremental improvement, and then all at once the development reaches critical mass and it’s everywhere, in all sorts of applications. It promises to change the way customers interact with automated systems, broadening the range of telephony interactions, and giving the call center a strong new tool on the front-end for capturing customer data.

According to one analyst, the worldwide market for automated speech recognition products is projected to jump from $100 million in 1998 to $1.6 billion in 2002. The US market potential for speech-enabled auto attendant products is expected to grow from less than $10 million in 1998 to $250 million by 2001.

The reason it is so explosive is twofold. First, the speed and power of the typical PC grew along the expected curve until it was strong enough to process speech in real-time. Second, the developed algorithms were steadily improved to allow computers to discern the appropriate patterns that underlie speech, without regard to accent, speed of speech or other eccentricity.

Speech rec is starting to gain a toehold in call centers as an autoselector — a tool that the customer uses to interact with an automated system to either route himself to the proper person (an auto attendant or ACD front-end) or extract the information he needs from a host database, à la IVR.

In the short and medium term, the interaction of choice for a customer wanting information is still going to be the telephone. While they are migrating to the Internet in huge numbers, call centers will still be deluged with phone requests for information, service, problem solving and order taking. IVR is still the dominant way for callers to routes themselves to their information destinations. When you put an intelligent speech engine in front of that you decrease the chances that the customer will ultimately have to make use of an agent’s time. Costs are shaved and customers go away slightly more satisfied.

By itself, speech rec doesn’t add new functionality to the call center. Instead, it adds new callers: those with rotary phones, those who are mobile, those who are so pressed for time that they can’t be bothered to do anything but speak. It then processes those callers using the same traditional tools that call centers have used for years. The same benefits flow from speech recognition as from IVR: fewer calls that have to go to an agent, shorter calls, and more self-service.

This technology generates a lot of excitement in the public because of its association with things like voice typing, or dialing a cell phone by voice. But clearly, the specialty applications call centers need — those that need to be speaker-independent — are more powerful in the long term, with the potential to save agents time on data collection.

Consider an application created by Nuance Communications for Schwab’s automated brokerage system. When I first saw this demoed in 1996, I thought it was pretty good: it understood me more than half the time, and seemed flexible. Now it’s even better. And according to Nuance, it now handles half of Schwab’s daily telephone stock quote volume, with 97% accuracy. With the migration of personal financial services to the Internet (and with price and service the determining factor in a competitive industry), giving a customer the ability to say “I’d like a quote on IBM” instead of typing out some ridiculous code is a key differentiator.

There are a lot of companies working on applications for this. As processing power improves and the cost of delivering a working application drops, it is likely that speech rec will take over as a successor to IVR as the “non-agent” telephony transaction.

The kinds of input that a speech rec system would have to process are very well defined-sequences of digits for things like account numbers, phone numbers, social security IDs or passwords. Or, some apps use discrete letters for getting stock quotes. There are a million ways to use it to extract information.

There are two distinct kinds of speech recognition, known as speaker-dependent and speaker-independent. The two diverge wildly in the kinds of things they are good at, and the kinds of systems needed to make them run.

Call center apps necessarily focus on speaker-independent recognition. Many people will call, obviously. The human brain in the form of a receptionist can recognize a huge number of variations of the same basic input—there are literally an infinite number of ways to intonate the word “hello.” What you want in a call center is a system that will respond to the likely inputs—the most common words like yes, no, stop, help, operator, etc., the digits, the letters of the alphabet, and so on.

Telecom has gradually been accepting the technology in operator assistance and routing systems. (But not everywhere you think. Some automated applications that ask users for spoken input, like directory assistance, are actually just recording it and playing it for the operator, who inputs it manually—it saves time, but speech rec it isn’t.)

Internationally, touch tone penetration is still very low, leaving a vast installed base of potential callers who can not access IVR. It follows that these callers are then going to be expensive to process when they come into a call center because they have to be held in queue until there’s an agent ready for them — high telecom charges from the longer than average wait, coupled with the cost of agent-service (rather than self-service). On the down side, international call centers, particularly those that serve multiple countries, can field calls in multiple languages. If you use an IVR front-end to have the caller select their language then you, by definition, don’t need speech rec. These are surmountable problems that have more to do with the operation of speech rec in practice than with the underlying technology.

Speech rec costs a lot to develop and perfect, but once it’s done, it’s done forever. The cost of maintaining it is negligible, and it has little of the headaches involved in CTI or other “fancy” call center technologies. Once you tease meaning out of the speech, it becomes input like any other, just like information entered via the Web, DTMF or told to an agent.

That’s the essence of speech recognition in the call center — it’s a simple front-end, with albeit limited application. But that’s what they said about IVR ten years ago, and look where we are today.

Giant retailer Sears has turned to speech recognition in a big way, implementing it in 750 of their retail stores nationwide as part of a program to redirect calls more efficiently. It’s also hoped that this will help them re-deploy almost 3,000 people to other, more productive tasks.

The automated speech system, built by Nuance, is part of Sears’ Central Call Taking initiative. About three-quarters of the calls that come in to each of the stores’ general numbers will be handled by the system; for a total of 120,000 calls each day.

Callers, when prompted, will be able to say the name of the department they want to reach — “shoes,” for example. The cost of automating the department transfer is much lower than the cost of having an operator do it. (Reps are available to assist in case a customer has trouble.) Sears will be able to use this system instead of hiring temps during the busy holiday season and other peak periods.

The system was piloted at some Sears stores during a recent holiday season. Development began the prior summer, a fairly quick turnaround for a system complex enough to stand in for 3,000 operators at 750 locations. Sears integrated the Nuance system into their existing IT infrastructure; a custom app uses the speech rec system’s ODBC hooks to query a centralized Oracle database for individual department phone extensions, reducing call transfer time.

This is one of the biggest examples of speech rec being used in consumer apps outside financial services. When retailers take on a technology, that’s a sure sign they feel comfortable with both the consumer acceptance and the technical sophistication of it.

Airlines have also been historic early adopters. Airlines have been out in front in pushing this technology as a way for their customers to get quick access to a wealth of information. American Airlines has one such system, which they call Dial-AA-Flight.

The airline’s automated flight information system gives customers data on arrivals, departures and gates. According to American, it handles approximately 19 million customer calls a year.

AA is moving to add a speech front-end to the system, at first in a pilot program (no pun intended) that will take 10% of the traffic. This is not American’s first use of speech rec. In 1999 they rolled out a similar service to their VIP customers.

(It’s interesting that speech, which just a few years ago was ridiculously bad at speaker-independent recognition, is now moving into real world applications from the top down, from best customers into the general pool.)

Adding On More Features Interactive Voice Response

IVR rarely stands by itself — it’s the perfect integration technology for a whole host of voice and data applications. Add-on features like speech recognition, text-to-speech and fax-on-demand are becoming popular. It’s important to choose a system with open integration so you can always add these features.

In narrowing your search down to the best vendor, look at the application you need, the services the company provides for support, and the image and reputation of the company.

Adding speech recognition is a time saver — especially when you have several prompts. A caller who knows what he wants to do can just say “claims department” and be connected. And as the Internet takes on a stronger role as a call center front-end, more and more companies will be offering access through all kinds of call center/computer telephony products. Some IVR vendors have already started.

Perhaps recognizing that the speech front-end is going to be at least as important as the touch tone interface in years to come, speech and IVR vendors are making hasty arrangements to work together, at least in presenting their products in an integrated fashion to potential customers.

Intervoice-Brite is acting as VAR for Nuance’s speech recognition engine, for example. Nuance’s speech rec is good, and is used in some notable high-traffic applications. Brite sells into some of the same markets, with large-scale IVR systems for government, financial services and telecom companies.

Combining with Nuance allows them to offer the base platform for front-ending the call center without having to develop speech rec on their own. It gives their customers the ability to choose speech rec as one option in front of the center, among others, that can include telephony input, Web and other CTI-enabled connections.

IVR companies tend to be very good at connecting with other companies for complementary product offerings — recall that several years ago they were among the first call center vendors to start building Web and email hooks into their systems, at the application generator level. Not so that they could start selling Web apps, mind you, but so that their customers could build them for themselves, or connect third-party service systems to the end user.

Quick Tips

1.     Know Your Callers. To develop the best caller interface, look at the most common questions, comments and information your callers request. This should guide you in determining the types of inquiries you should let your IVR system handle. Getting a good handle on who your customers are and the reasons why they call can lead you toward an IVR system with applications specific to your needs.

2.     Use IVR as a way to handle an especially large volume of calls for special applications. If Monday morning is your busiest time, rather than adding staff, use IVR to handle the extra calls. Or, instead of staffing up for special promotions and offers that you know will heat up the phone lines, consider ways you can use IVR to handle the callers who don’t need to speak to a live agent.

3.     You should not overuse IVR or overprogram voice prompts. Think of the application as a tree with branches. Too many prompts at once will confuse callers, or by the time they get to “press 6 for X” they will have forgotten what one, two and three announced. Three or four prompts is enough. After callers press a corresponding number you can have another three or four menu prompts lead to more options based on their first selection.

4.     Always make sure that during business hours callers can press 0 to reach a live operator. They are, mostly, not stupid. They will try 0, and *, and #, and even pretend to have a rotary phone to avoid standing in the queue. Don’t treat them like they are a mass of cattle to be herded towards your destination. The call costs you next to nothing, until an agent gets involved. Give them something to do, some knowledge of what they have access to, and what they’ll need to provide when they finally do get to talk to someone.

5.     Don’t tell them to enter their account number or other information through the keypad unless you really, really intend to use it. Nothing makes people angrier, and makes you look more incompetent, than to have your agent ask them for something they just entered.

What To Think Of When You Shop Interactive Voice Response

Evaluating various systems? Here are some selection and installation tips to keep in mind when looking over the vendor brochures.

1.  Choose a system that lets you easily add more telephone interfaces and voice storage capacity — you should always anticipate growth. Line capacity describes the number of simultaneous conversations the system can handle. This requirement is a function of anticipated traffic, peak volume demands and the tolerance of the caller receiving a busy signal or a ring-back of more than two or three rings.

2.  User interfaces are typically subjectively evaluated during the system selection process, and are a function of the script and recordings. Recordings are usually first created by the installer, but updates are maintained via recordings made after the installation. Thus, the ease with which the system administrator can manage recordings is critical.

3.  The product should allow high quality recordings to be made directly with a microphone or telephone set, but should also support recordings made by commercial studios.

4.  System usage reports are critical in preventing a business using an IVR system from isolating itself from its callers. The system must be capable of supplying informative reports about the nature and disposition of incoming calls, such as:

§  How long did people stay on the line?

§  How many hung up without making any selections?

§  What items were selected most often?

§  How many after-hours callers left messages for an agent to return their call?

5.  Make sure the vendor understands exactly what you want. Tell them exactly what you want your customers to hear. Check references so you’ll know their history of service and support.

6.  Your system should not force regular callers to listen to lengthy prompts. Callers should be able to bypass recordings and skip to the prompt they want to hear.

Increasingly, thanks to better integration between IVR and the switch, you can offer IVR as one option to callers languishing in the hold queue.