By ROCKY from Phone Marketing Insider - Posted Jan 14, 2010 

From a business’s financial and marketing perspective, the advantages of automated telephone services are clear. IVR and cloud telephony capabilities enable businesses to reduce costs while providing more features and services. Yet, no matter how high the efficiency projections for automated telephone services soar, the bottom line needs to result in customers on the other end of the phone call reporting the best customer service experience.

Do customer’s prefer automated telephone services? The survey says… an overwhelming “yes!”

Nuance’s research into the customer’s reaction and perception of automated telephone services tackles this precise issue. They commissioned a study, conducted by Forrester Research, titled “Driving Consumer Engagement with Automated Telephone Customer Service.” The study found that in straightforward phone interactions, including prescription refills, flight status, checking account balances, store information requests and tracking shipments, customers rated a higher preference for automated services over live agents. In the past year, while 82% of Americans experienced speech recognition software or automated touchtones, only a slightly higher figure of 93% of Americans engaged with live agents.

Customer surveys in five industries showed that customers enjoy proactive automated phone notifications in areas such as appointment reminders and travel updates. Customer interest in these notifications ranged from 80% to 93% in the chosen industries.

Why do customer’s prefer automated services?

A key finding in the survey indicated the following statistics:

The 24-hour 7 days a week availability of automated telephone customer service is a key attribute in consumers’ minds. Seventy-seven percent of consumers pointed to 24-hour, seven days a week availability as a reason they value automated telephone customer service systems. Another 40% valued that they didn’t have to wait on hold for a live agent, while 31% cited the ability to obtain information quickly.

While the survey results came out strongly in favor of automated telephone services, customers did distinguish between their interactions with different systems. For example, 67% of customers noted the importance of an “opt out” function to speak with a live agent, and 75% noted this option as the number one way to improve an automated telephone service. Similarly, customers noticed the importance of a system’s logical call flow as “an essential component,” and 45% noted this feature as the top way to improve customer satisfaction. Speech recognition quality also plays a significant role in the customer’s mind, as 42% of customers wanted the speech recognition to understand them on the first try, and 63% chose this factor as the most important way to improve the customer service experience.

How should marketers and businesses use this study?

According to Nuance,

As the research shows, there is a lot of room to improve customer service. Today’s enterprises have the opportunity to differentiate themselves by considering their customers’ needs and providing intuitive speech applications that improve customer loyalty at every touch point.

Now that this study indicates the acceptability, and in fact preference, of customers for automated telephone calls in certain situations, marketers and businesses must evaluate which of their activities they can automate, and how they can most effectively do so. Choosing the right cloud telephony provider is a good first step.

By Nancy Jamison from SpeechTechMag.com - Posted Aug 27, 2009

Remember the Analog Display Terminal Interface (ADTI) phone that promised to let you surf the Web from your kitchen? How about virtual assistants, such as Wildfire, Hey Anita!, Webley, and General Magic? In the late 1990s, Web-enabled display phones and virtual assistants were a virtual market that didn’t go anywhere. However, what is old is new again, and now phones of all types let you search the Web, either visually, by voice, or in combination, and any communication device has the power to act as a personal assistant using speech as a voice user interface (VUI).

What happened to facilitate this change? Much as we hoped back then, those applications were ahead of their time. To do a refresh on how we got here, I chatted with Michael Thompson, senior vice president and general manager of Nuance Mobile, about the changes that have occurred since the mid-1990s and the developments that have caused the tipping point for mass adoption of speech as a user interface. While focused on Nuance, this history is made up of many speech technology vendors.

To set the table, in the 1990s we had traditional telephone interfaces with minimal computing power and an infant Web. Contact centers were half a decade into providing interactive voice response (IVR) for self-service and had just begun to add VUIs as an option. For speech, it took an entire server to run a speech interface that consisted of very canned, directed dialogue with a caller that took forever to accomplish anything. 

What really pushed the growth and sophistication of speech applications was an acceleration in computing power and the development of the Internet. Standards emerged, servers became much more powerful, and mobile devices started to proliferate. Simultaneously, speech technologies became more sophisticated, and we shrunk the footprint required to run them, enabling less expensive deployments and a mix of server and chip-based speech solutions, depending on the application. 

As Thompson pointed out, what really carried Nuance and others through the middle years between concept and proliferation was the contact center. As vendors pushed to speech-enable IVR and off-load agents by providing self-service options to customers, speech technology vendors, such as Nuance, advanced their core technologies. This included improvements in speed and accuracy, better grammars, more languages, and more natural sounding text-to-speech. Nuance also advanced natural language capabilities to make VUIs acceptable and useful for customers, opening the door for truly effective voice search of databases and the Web. In addition, Nuance grew the embedded side of its business—first in automobiles and then on handsets—and then continued to enhance dictation. 

Speech Is Required

However, the real tipping point for speech came when the visual screen appeared on handsets, thereby unleashing an endless amount that could be provided to the end user, including multimodal applications. This coincided with the advent of unified communications (UC), which uses mobile applications as one of the core sets of solutions for end users. For mobility solutions to be truly effective, speech technologies are required. 

Now we have reached a point of convergence in the advancement of these different technologies—including greater computing power and scalability, improved natural language, and the unification of consumer and business applications—so that speech technologies are proliferating everywhere. Even on low-end cell phones, people can search the Web, command and control applications, dial by voice, search for businesses, buy and play music, order goods and services, update corporate databases, get driving directions, and so much more. Today’s mobile phones are sophisticated devices, fully connected to the network and multifaceted for both business and pleasure. 

Besides UC-based mobility applications, contact centers, enterprise desktop applications, entertainment software, and automotive applications are just a few areas now incorporating speech technologies. 

My next column will focus on some of the new and revolutionary ways speech is being used in these areas. For example, I’ll discuss the growing use of speech-to-text, voice search, predictive text, and rich multimodal applications. Stay tuned.

By Leonard Klie from SpeechTechMag.com - Posted Jul 14, 2009

According to research by DMG Consulting, the overall interactive voice rsponse (IVR) market will grow to $2.7 billion by 2011, with renewed interest applied to hosted/managed service vendors with both inbound and outbound applications that have “reinvigorated the IVR sector with innovation, quick deployments, and cost-effective solutions with a high value proposition and rapid [return on investment].”

Among the highly competitive hosted/managed service providers driving the trend are Contact Solutions, Nuance Communications, Prairie Interactive Messaging, Tellme Networks, TuVox, Voxify, and West Interactive, according to DMG’s report.

Overall, the firm projects a four-year compound annual growth rate of 13.4 percent for the hosted/managed-inbound IVR sector and 18.7 percent for the outbound IVR segment.

At the same time, though, sales of premises-based IVR solutions are expected to decline. Organizations of all types—companies large and small, governments, higher education, non-profits, and others—that previously bypassed hosted/managed service IVR offerings are not only considering these offerings, but making commitments, the report states.

“Self-service IVR solutions are important for enterprises in good times, and become critical when budgets are tight because they are highly effective in automating interactions that do not require the cognitive capabilities of live agents,” says Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting. “Many of the hosted/managed service IVR providers have come to market with inbound and outbound offerings that are highly responsive to the economic and technical challenges of their customers, and this is speeding up the pace of adoption.”

The projections that the IVR market will continue to attract a lot of attention and investment dollars come as good news for the entire industry, which has seen years of relative quiet. During the first half of 2008, for example, the North American market for IVR and voice portal systems grew at about 10 percent, according to Research & Markets. And even as economies started to slow, sales of speech applications for IVR and voice portal systems were still being built and deployed in large numbers.

By midyear, though, the economic slowdown started adversely affecting sales, especially in the bellwether financial services and insurance industries. However, the demand for next-generation voice portal systems with advanced speech recognition interfaces, as well as the traditional IVR systems designs with dual tone multifrequency (DTMF) interfaces, continued to be high in 2008. Self-service applications running on these systems continued to drive their purchase and use.

“Management of operational costs to handle inbound customer contacts has been and will continue to be the most significant business driver for the creation of self-service applications as well as the sale of IVR and voice portal systems they run on,” the Research & Markets report concluded. “Proactive customer contact applications are rapidly emerging as the IVR and voice portal system’s next big growth engine. Despite over 25 years of applying technology and process improvements, live customer service agents continue to represent the majority of most contact centers’ costs.”

But while the future is bright for the IVR market, the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) market hasn’t fared as well, and that is not projected to change in the short term as budget constraints apply additional downward pressure on the market.

“For 2009, we anticipate a degree of vendor volatility that will cause many customers to stay on the sidelines for a longer period of time than we would expect if downward pressure was coming only from the weakened economy,” Alan Weckel, director of the Dell’Oro Group, predicted in another report. “In the current environment, some customers will hold on to existing analog and digital lines for a longer period of time.”

Notwithstanding, VoIP penetration will continue to grow, albeit at a slower pace compared to previous years, Weckel anticipates. According to the report, Cisco Systems, Avaya, and Nortel Networks had the most IP line shipments in the quarter, but IP line shipments in general for the eight largest vendors in the market—namely Aastra, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, NEC, Nortel, and Siemens—averaged only 49 percent of total line shipments in the quarter. That leaves plenty of room for other vendors to get their feet in the door.

By Haim Argaman from SpeechTechMag.com - Posted Jun 22, 2009

Imagine this. Your company is trying to stay profitable in the midst of an economic downturn. You want to keep up with the competition and cut costs, so you decide to update your speech-enabled interactive voice response (IVR) system. You hire developers to come up with an appropriate interface. Soon you’re ready to go and launch a new speech-enabled IVR. "Hooray/Great/Yes!" you think to yourself. Hold times will go down, customers will be thrilled, and you’ll make it through the tough economy ahead of the competition and with more customers than ever.

Sound like this could be you? The fact is, I’m always chagrined to see companies investing in new IVR systems and not checking on the projected returns. If you’re preparing to take on an IVR project, you’re on the right track, but take my advice—do a return on investment analysis first. Speech-enabled IVR is a great way to cut costs and improve customer service in a downturn, but you need a road map if you’re going to reach your company goals and have clients notice an improvement in your service. Otherwise, somewhere down the road, something invariably will go wrong. This is no surprise, because implementing speech-enabled IVR systems within a call center is never straightforward. Even if the design functions perfectly, you have to make sure you select the project that will deliver the most beneficial results. Without ROI analysis to determine the best project scope to maximize profitability, you’re just driving blind. But over and over again, I see companies losing money and consequently missing their business goals. The new or improved IVR system may work perfectly as designed but still fail to yield the projected returns.

The result? Piles of lost money just when it is needed most. The company suffers, the clients suffer, and a blaming finger is pointed at the speech-enabled system.

Don’t let this happen to you! There doesn’t need to be high risk in implementing a new speech-enabled IVR system, and ROI analysis can let you skip the worry and the unpleasant surprises. so then, skip the worry and the unpleasant surprises. I always say that advanced speech-enabled IVR systems are the future of customer service, but you need to be able to justify the changes.

The trouble is, more often than not, businesses may not realize the complexity of an IVR system overhaul. But think about it. How will the new IVR impact hold rates? Drop rate? Call volume? How long before churn rates improve? How will the change affect your agent staff? It takes complex analysis to forecast the impact of a new IVR system in a call center environment. ROI analysis is an intricate process that makes sure you choose the right approach for your speech-enabled IVR system, addressing your company needs..  

As far as I’m concerned, ROI analysis is a crucial stage of IVR system development—especially in an economic downturn. Take my word for it! You don’t have to take any unnecessary risks. You can get through the economic downturn intact with ROI analysis on a carefully planned speech-enabled IVR system.

 With ROI analysis, you can now predict the future!

By Stephen Lawrence from SpeechTechMag.com - Posted Apr 2, 2009

Society’s expectations for more personalized products and services have risen. As a result, vendors need to better understand their customers and prospects to remain competitive in the marketplace. One of the best ways for a company to do this is to spend time examining the interactions between its employees and customers. Speech analytics delivers the insights organizations require to do just that. Analytics provides opportunities to improve the customer experience, enforce compliance and protocol as required by law, and mitigate risk.

The marketplace for speech analytics is a nascent environment, and not all organizations are aware that the technology exists. With the arrival of 2009, a big question remains in the minds of speech analytics vendors: Is this the year that speech analytics adoption will cross the chasm from early adopters to the early majority? 

According to an Aberdeen survey conducted in November and December, 31 percent of best-in-class organizations have implemented speech analytics and 24 percent plan to do so. This compares to only 16 percent of all other companies that have already implemented analytics and 26 percent that plan to do so. What is evident is the low adoption level and continued growth in the near future. 

For speech analytics adoption to continue, it is important to understand why organizations implement it. Aberdeen probed survey respondents to find out what drives them to introduce speech analytics into their contact centers.

An overwhelming percentage (66 percent) of companies indicated that they implemented speech analytics to improve the customer experience. That said, organizations also indicated that improving customer retention (24 percent), reducing costs (24 percent), and improving compliance monitoring efficiency (22 percent) are other important reasons for using speech analytics. 

With the increase in video usage by both consumers (think YouTube) and enterprises (think of that demo video you watched on speech analytics), it is evident that a lot of speech is locked in video. Yet it is difficult to find this information. It is often found using keywords, phrases, and metadata (e.g., title, subject, or person) that identify the video. Speech analytics can provide much-needed access to the information locked within the video itself. This can result in companies saving time and money that is spent creating, for example, the right metadata. 

The benefits reaped by contact center agents can also be realized by users outside the contact center. For example, litigators now have the ability to search hundreds, if not thousands, of documents that in the past would have taken many man-hours to do. Companies in financial services can now closely monitor their businesses across a much larger sample of conversations for regulatory compliance. 

Departments such as marketing, public relations, sales, and engineering, as well as industries such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals, can also benefit from implementing speech analytics. Furthermore, speech analytics should not be considered just a stand-alone application. It is also highly useful as a module that can bring value to users of customer relationship management, e-learning, or business intelligence applications.

Although the adoption level of speech analytics in the contact center is low, there is promise for growth. Moreover, while the initial growth and acceptance of speech analytics is in contact centers, speech analytics is already being adopted in other areas of companies, as well as in a variety of industries