Charles Berger Explains How Voice Recognition Technology Will Improve Interactions With Customers

PDF File: 

CRM5_wp_berger.pdf

Nuance Communications Inc.

From the call center to field operations, voice recognition technologies are helping companies toprovide better service to customers while cutting costs.

Defying The Limits: How does speech recognition fit in a company’s overall CRM strategy?

Charles Berger: Speech recognition is increasingly becoming an important part of a company’s CRM strategy. A lot of customers want to be contacted and given information, do transactions, retrieve information, change the information about their situation, like name and address, over the phone. Many people don’t have access, or don’t have access at a time they want to do things, to the Internet. The phone is a great way to do that. It is still the way the bulk of retail customers in particular interface with large institutions that are serving them. Speech provides a much more natural interface than a touch-tone system does.

A recorded voice can come on and say, “How may I help you?” rather than those very annoying “press one to nine,” and then you get another layer of “press one to nine,” and after three or four layers of menus you’re either lost or you’ve finally gotten to your destination.

We’re seeing large enterprises in virtually every sector that have large call centers using speech as their primary interface with the customer, rather than touch-tone or very expensive and sometimes unpredictable live agents.

DTL: How are the end customers reacting to voice recognition versus the digital keypad?

CB: They’re reacting very positively. We’ve seen this by two measures. Many of our customers do regular customer surveys of customer satisfaction. They often find an increase from a six or seven out of 10 in the customer satisfaction rating to north of nine out of 10 in customer satisfaction. That, again, is due to the much more natural interface.

We also commissioned an independent survey by Harris Interactive of people’s use of speech [recognition] and whether they had experienced it or not. We found most of the people had, and there was a very high percentage who were very happy with the results they got from the speech interface.

DTL: What are some of the major trends in this market? What can we look for in the future?

CB: I look for three or four things. First, the evolution of a more natural language interface. Speech in the past, in some of the simpler applications, has been limited to “Press or say one” or “Press and say a flight number” or “Press and say your account number.” That’s going to change, and already has changed, to a more natural language interface where you’ll call your bank and a voice will come on and say “How can I help you?” and you can say something as disjointed as, “Gee, I lost my credit card.” And it will recognize that and take you to the right application.

The next significant turn beyond that will be using your voiceprint as a biometric for verifying who you are. We have the technology to the point where with virtually 100 percent accuracy, we can take your voiceprint and accept you into a transaction with high confidence you are the person you say you are. It avoids customers having to remember PINs or the dog’s hair color or some other things along those lines.

I think the final big trend you’re going to see is speech, particularly in the wireless telco carriers, being used more and more for enhanced services. The most humorous one, which I just read about today, is Virgin Wireless is using a speech interface to enhance their blind dating service – you can program your phone to call you at a certain hour during a blind date to provide you with an excuse to leave if you’re not happy with the blind date.

DTL: How mature is this market? I think we’re pretty much at the beginning of it. Is that right?

CB: We really are. If you look at the automated applications in the market today, less than 5 percent of them have been automated. If you look beyond that, to these enhanced services I just mentioned, that’s a whole new idea that’s just getting started. So we think we’re very early in the market.

DTL: What is the touch-tone market penetration at this point?

CB: Touch-tone today is probably about 40 or 50 percent of the contact time that customers have with call centers. I think that automation will continue to rise. It will happen, though, as speech applications rather than touch-tone applications.

DTL: Who were the early adopters in this field? What industries are finding this most effective? Can you give us some examples of specific companies that use this?

CB: Our very first customer was Charles Schwab and they actually put us into business because we spun out of the Stanford Research Institute back in the mid-90s. They first started this with a simple stock quote system and now you can actually do a complex stock trade or transaction totally with an automated speech user interface.

The other group that has been very fast to adopt this technology is the telco carriers. They have large customer interface needs with billing, service changes, feature adds and deletes, name and address changes. So the major telcos, like AT&T, Bell Canada, Telus, Verizon and Sprint, are all significant customers of ours.

DTL: I would imagine the gas and electric companies would also find this technology useful. Is that correct?

CB: Yes, and interestingly in two different ways. There’s lots of voice interface between you and your utility for billing problems, service outages and service calls. So it’s definitely happening there. The other place it’s happening is inwardfacing applications for their field force automation. We have a partner called Datria, and they’re providing field force automation applications so service reps for gas and electric companies can actually get their work assignment over a voice interface and then, as they complete and close the ticket, give the information the utility needs to close that ticket out by voice interface. Then they move onto their next assignment, getting a 15 to 25 percent productivity enhancement out of their workforces.

DTL: What other developments should companies be looking for in this area?

CB: Speech verification is going to be next. Another thing will be more creative ways to come up with enhanced services. And then the final thing is that people will start to use the speech as Bell Canada has to create a personality or a persona for their company. Bell Canada has a woman called Emily who they have created who is the Bell Canada customer service person. They feature her in their advertisements, in their billboard and promotional materials, but she started as their speech application for customer care.

DTL: Is that a real person who is on the automated system?

CB: It’s a person they created on their Web site. We use some recorded voices to create the effect along with some computer voices. But Emily is real to a lot of people.