Industry insider Steve Chirokas (News - Alert) recently lookedat some of the issues surrounding voice recognition automation. They can be summarized as follows:
Job preservation, departmental conflict, vendor focus, and technology issues are only a handful reasons why many organizations have not been able to optimize their customer care initiatives while reducing costs with some level of automation.
Why automate? Voice recognition performance is now exceptionally capable. Recognition accuracy, however, is only one facet of voice self-service. An ability to engage callers in ever more complex interactions enable voice recognition solutions to step beyond informational repositories and into the realm of problem solving.
Combine that with eliminating hold time, and providing callers with dialog consistency impossible to achieve with an agent pool and you have improved customer satisfaction as a primary value proposition. Significant cost savings tag (News - Alert) along as agent interactions are usually orders of magnitude more expensive than self-service.
What do you want to automate? This is an expansive topic with automation options running the gamut from call routing to order collection to technical support and beyond. One of the most important steps to take with any voice recognition effort is to carefully define what will be automated. Just as important, yet sometimes overlooked, is to consider what will be automated in the context of the agent resources that work with automation, and how that will impact the caller.
Using automation to either improve agent performance or allow agents to concentrate on higher value tasks are additional reasons to deploy voice recognition. One example might be to employ automation within an agent script to play a legal announcement that requires consistent precision. Voice recognition can be used to collect a caller’s acceptance or rejection. Then, return the call back to the agent.
Another possibility is to employ voice recognition along with other technology purely to improve agent metrics such as rapid response to a caller request. One example is to use voice recognition to immediately identify what a caller is looking for. Then, send (‘whisper’) the captured audio along with a screen pop to the next available agent.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Chris DiMarco