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News from SpeechTEK 2008
August 21, 2008
By
Historically, SpeechTEK has been a developer's conference, and I found that
to be pretty much true at SpeechTEK 2008 in New York City. There was,
perhaps, less talk about new state-of-the-art platforms and VXML than in the
past couple of years and more emphasis on the business value of speech-enabled
applications. The speech industry is maturing and the focus has moved
beyond proving that speech technology is ready to deploy, to bringing down the
complexity and cost of deployments. Announcements from Genesys and
Nexidia exemplify the new movement .
Genesys announced the availability of the latest version of its Genesys
Voice Platform (
Nexidia announced the latest version of its speech analytics solution, the
Nexidia Enterprise Speech Intelligence (ESI) 7.0. ESI 7.0 brings
improvements in performance, scalability and usability. As mentioned above
about GVP 8, ESI 7.0 is more visual and intuitive than previous versions and
supports new dashboards for more quickly identifying trends and anomalies in
contact center-customer interactions. Nexidia also announced Quickstart
libraries of customizable pre-defined search routines that both speeds the
creation and lowers the cost of speech searches. Nexidia has created
Quickstart libraries for regulatory compliance, competitive strategy and
business process improvement.
Case Studies Presentated at SpeechTEK
Boston Medical Center deployed a speech-based application for monitoring
the health of patients with chronic conditions such as diabetes and
obesity. The over-the-telephone speech recognition application running on
the Envox 7 platform conducts patient interviews to determine their condition,
and then provides information, advice and coaching. The capability to
monitor patients over-the-telephone instead of in an office visit enables
more frequent monitoring and makes recommendations more affordable and less
strenuous and stressful for patients.
AAA of Washington state is Washington's largest emergency road service
provider, insurance provider and travel agency. It supports its one
million members through its 350-person contact center. Recently it
invested in a new voice recording system from Verint Witness Actionable
Solutions (WAS) and also began to use the speech analytics functionality of the
Impact 360 suite.
Like many other contact centers, in addition to system reports, it gathers
anecdotal insights into how the center is operating from its agents and
supervisors. Often these informal insights are enough to find and correct
problems. AAA Washington found the value of adding a more scientific
approach with speech analytics. Verint WAS's speech analytics is now
being used to analyze the center's recorded interactions with its
members. So far, it has found root causes for spikes in call volumes, long
duration calls and occasionally, agent misbehavior. In addition to finding
hidden center inefficiencies or root causes of member dissatisfaction, the
analytics application has provided detailed support for anecdotally
reported issues, which has been useful to gain management support necessary to
fix the issues.
SpeechTEK: The Bottom Line
Having tracked speech technology's application for customer contact and
attended speech conferences for more than 10 years, I conclude that:
·
Speech technology is ready for deployment in support of enterprise
businesses.
·
IVR and voice portal platforms have become reliable, scalable and affordable
and, if not completely based on industry standard hardware and software, much
less proprietary than in the past.
·
Application languages and development environments have become more
standards-based, intuitive and accessible.
·
Actual speech-enabled application development, while steadily improving,
can still be as much art as science.
·
The cost of custom speech-enabled application development and support,
while gradually decreasing, is still relatively high.
·
Both the number of speech-enabled application developers and the variety of
industry-specific applications are growing steadily.
These are all signs of a healthy growing industry; good
for the industry -- good for its customers.
CONTACT CENTER
CORNER: Pro-active Customer Contact - Much More Than Tele-Marketing
August 14, 2008
By
Traditionally, pro-active customer contact has meant tele-marketing,
tele-sales and outbound calling for debt collection. These activities are
still a large part of most business' uses of pro-active contact. However,
driven by growing competitive and economic pressures, leading enterprises
across many industries are turning to pro-active contact to cement and grow
profitable customer relationships. They are using a wide variety of
business applications supported by an equally wide variety of technologies.
Applications of Pro-Active Customer Contact
Among the growing uses of pro-active customer contact are:
·
Calling or messaging customers directly based on customer lists for
customer service or sales purposes.
·
Outbound manual and automated calling or messaging customers
o
one way messaging - to deliver a message such as, "This is a message
from Yuki's Flowers. Your flowers were delivered at 1:25 PM on Monday, April 4.
Thank you for your business".
o
interactive messaging - to deliver a message with optional additional
information or assisted service such as, "This is a courtesy message from
BigCo. All our canoes will be on sale this weekend. Press 1 or stay
on the line to hear more details about this sale." Or, "This is to confirm
your appointment on Tuesday at 9 AM with Dr. Smith; press 1 or stay on the line
to be connected with Dr. Smith's office to change your appointment."
·
Calling or messaging customers to obtain feedback on their
products/services or customers' recent interactions with the company.
·
o
these surveys can be based on recent interactions, such as immediately
after a customer call to customer service or soon after a purchase, delivery or
installation.
o
these surveys can also be related to a company event, such as a marketing
campaign or customer segment analysis, or they can be randomly
solicited.
Technologies Which Support Pro-active Customer Contact
Just as there are many uses of pro-active customer contact there are many
technologies and solutions to support these contacts. They include:
·
automated dialing applications, which can be operated in various states of
automation, such as power, preview and predictive
·
automated interactive voice response platform-based outbound applications
·
notification or alerting applications, which can be event-driven or based
on pre-defined schedules and which can support various modes and media,
including e-mail, text messaging and pre-recorded speech
·
automated survey and customer feedback applications
·
widgets, which are Web-based applications to offer either live chat or
live-person telephone-based service
Pro-active customer contact solutions can run the gamut from single
function, point solutions such as simple alerts to comprehensive programs
that would be fully integrated with inbound customer contact solutions,
customer information systems and contact center applications. The point
solutions, as well as the more comprehensive inbound/outbound contact center
systems, can be deployed as either in-house or customer-premises based,
outsourced as hosted services or a combination of in-house and outsourced.
Part 1 in this series introduced the business drivers for
pro-active customer contact,
Part 3 in this series will compare some of the leading pro-active customer
contact solutions and services on the market, and Part 4 will highlight
pro-active customer contact success stories.
Pro-active Customer Contact, Part 1: Why The Time Is
Right
August 6, 2008
By
Given my focus on the leading edges of customer contact you might wonder
why I would be writing a series of articles about pro-active customer contact.
Haven't outbound calling, auto dialers, and tele-marketing been around for
years? Yes, but despite the obvious value of outbound contact for some
businesses and the maturity of the technologies, most companies still do not
employ service-related pro-active customer contact. Instead, almost 80 percent
rely entirely on their customers to contact them for questions, problems, and
even, in the case of many Internet-based businesses, for sales.
So, calling customers, per se, is not new. What is new is that leading
companies, are discovering the strategic business value of comprehensive
approaches to pro-active customer contact. They are leveraging customer and
product information from across the enterprise to reach out to their customers
with personalized service messages and sales offers to cement and grow
profitable relationships. For the real leading-edge companies their pro-active
customer contact initiatives are an integral part of their unified
communications strategies, i.e. their internal and external communications
strategies are intertwined and synergistic.
Reactive-only Customer Contact Is Not Good Enough Anymore
Depending upon the industry your company competes in you may already be
feeling the competitive pressures to be more pro-active with your customers.
Historically, the more commoditized industries have relied disproportionately
on services for differentiation to create/maintain competitive advantage. And,
not surprisingly, these same industries are leading the pro-activity movement.
Increasingly global competition and a weak North American economy are two of
the macro business drivers for pro-active customer contact, but there are also
micro drivers, including:
·
to improve the efficiency of the customer contact organization;
·
to increase customer retention and loyalty;
·
to increase revenues and expand business with current customers; and
·
to add new customers.
Pro-Active Customer Contact: Improving Call Center Operations
Improving the efficiency of the customer contact organization for most companies,
means the doing more with less in their customer service group and call
centers. Due to the inherent peaks and valley in incoming customer call
traffic, making pro-active customer calls during the lulls for incoming calls
makes use of previously unused people's and systems' capacity. Other benefits
include:
·
reductions in inbound calls -- e.g. shipping notifications eliminate the
need shipment status calls from customers;
·
job diversity for call center agents -- often, but I appreciate
not always, viewed as positive and job enriching by agents; and
·
reduction of customer complaints -- again, pro-active notification of
problems can eliminate complaint calls, which I think I can safely say always
has a positive impact on agents' job satisfaction and usually on turnover.
Pro-Active Customer Contact: Increasing Customer Retention and Loyalty
Pro-actively contacting customers with service information useful to them
or with personalized sales offers is generally viewed by customers as positive
and brand reinforcing. These positive effects have been shown to
contribute to customer loyalty and increased purchases from the pro-active
company over time. Frederick Reicheld, author of The Loyalty Effect, in
researching successful companies, discovered the longer they retained a
customer the more profitable that customer become for them. Likewise, I am sure
everyone is tired of hearing that it is significantly less costly to retain
current customers than to acquire new ones. Although, based on how many
companies treat their customers its clear not everyone believes those
economics.
A related topic, much in the news these days, is first contact resolution,
which is also promoted as a way call centers can improve its customers'
positive attitudes toward the company and thereby their loyalty. By
pro-actively contacting customers with valuable service information, you cannot
just resolve their questions/problems/concerns more effectively you can
eliminate the need for their calls in the first place. The fourth article in
this series will be all about leading customer examples, but one that fits here
is the flower delivery company, which eliminated 80 percent of its incoming
calls by pro-actively contacting customers to let them know their flowers had
been delivered.
Pro-Active Customer Contact: Increasing Revenues
Pro-actively contacting customers should have as minimum goals to reduce
your expenses and increase your customers' positive attitudes toward your
company and its products/services. Increasingly, enterprises are adding revenue
goals for their call centers and pro-active contact is becoming the leading way
to achieve these. Call centers with these new revenue goals quickly discover
that customers calling with problems and complaints are not as likely to
respond positively to sales offers as pro-actively contacted customers
are. In addition, when working with B2B customers the person calling with
a problem is often not the appropriate person in the organization to respond to
a sales offer.
Pro-Active Customer Contact: Adding New Customers
Adding new customers, usually the primary responsibility of the sales and
marketing groups can be impacted by the call center through pro-active customer
contact. And, I don't mean by calling prospects in the classic tele-marketing
sense. It is of course a generalization, but happy customers tell their friends
and pro-active customer contact can, as mentioned above, have a positive effect
on customers and brand loyalty. There are many other strategies and technologies
for supporting customer communities, such as forums, and social networking,
which I will discuss in future articles, but the point here is that pro-active
customer contact can play a part in generating positive customer
recommendations.
Part 2 in this series will explore the components of
pro-active customer contact programs, Part 3 will compare some of the leading
pro-active customer contact solutions on the market, and Part 4 will highlight
pro-active customer contact success stories.
Is Your Call Center
Killing Your Business?
July 21, 2008
By
"Of course not!" you say. Don't be so sure.
First, let me say I appreciate there are many call centers filled with
enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and customer-focused people doing their very best to
address customers' questions and problems. I also know there are many
call centers applying the latest techniques and technologies to make their
people both efficient and effective in support of their missions. But having
positive attitudes and working hard while necessary are not sufficient to
ensure your call center is helping your business not hurting it.
One very significant question to ask yourself about your organization and
its call centers is how aligned with the core business strategies of the organization
are they? Dimension Data, in its past several year's annual global contact
center survey of large enterprises, found that less than half viewed their
customer service organizations and call centers as strategic to their
businesses. If your enterprise's call centers are fully aligned with your
business strategies consider yourself lucky, but don't stop there in
determining if your call centers are doing all they can to help your business.
Your Call Centers: Helping or Hurting --- 10 Questions to Consider
1. How open for business are you?
Is your call center operated only from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday throgh
Friday, or is it open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? The key here is not how
many hours your call center is open, but whether your customers can access
people or applications for help when they need it or when it is convenient for
them. The right answer is not necessarily 7x24, but whatever is appropriate for
your target market customers.
2. How easy to do business with are you?
This is a topic for several books, but some of the customer service and
call center considerations include:
·
Do your people speak your customers' languages--actual language (English,
Spanish, French ...) as well as the specific language of your products/services
(plumbing parts, cell phones, landscaping)?
·
Do your applications (voice and web) speak your customers' languages and
are they intuitive and easy-to-use?
·
Do you always offer live-person help as an option in your automated
customer applications?
·
Are your call centers adequately staffed to provide minimal wait times to
speak with an agent?
·
Are your agents trained, equipped, and organized to provide prompt service?
This raises several important topics in addition to ensuring agents are properly
trained and experienced in the use of the tools provided, including: Do your
call center systems have sufficient capacity to operate with sub-second
response even under their peak loads? Are your agent processes streamlined and
all bottlenecks and redundancies removed, such as duplicate data entry and
logging on/off multiple applications to access information or to make changes?
·
Are your automated customer applications available, fast, and responsive?
3. Can your customers get answers to their questions and problems?
I am not talking about the customer is always right or whether your company
should always give customers the answers they want. That would be determined by
your business strategy. In your call centers, the question is just whether you
are providing your customers with any answers to their questions and
resolutions to their problems. For this, the issues include:
·
Are your call center people fully trained to do their jobs, such as how to
operate the necessary systems and how to interact with customers?
·
Are your call center people and applications supported by the necessary
customer and product information to answer questions and resolve problems?
·
Are your call center people empowered to resolve customers' problems, at
least the majority of those that reach the center?
·
How successful are you at resolving customers' questions/issues during
their first contact?
·
For questions/issues you cannot answer during the first contact, do you
have escalation and follow-up processes to close the loop in time frames
acceptable to your customers?
·
Are you able to effectively deal with questions about the
"off-label" uses of your products or interactions with your products
and 3rd-party products?
·
Are you providing customers with consistent answers and resolutions across
all of your customer interaction points, in-person at your stores or branch
offices, calls to your call centers, on your web site?
4. Are you providing personalized service to your
customers?
When customers contact your call centers, can you quickly access
information about them and provide services and offering which are tailored to
that customer? Can you do this across all of your customer interaction points?
5. If your products/services are sold through partners and resellers how well
are those customers supported? Are your partners and resellers using the same systems or are their
systems fully linked with yours in order to provide seamless service?
6. Do you provide
pro-active service to your customers? Do you reach out to your
customers to provide useful information and offerings or do you wait for them
to contact you?
7. How closely
are you monitoring your customers' satisfaction with your products/services?
Do you know whether your customers' questions/issues are being addressed
successfully by your call center? Really, based on actual responses from those
customers or something else, like a report that lists closed tickets?
8. Does your call center support both customer service and sales? Of course, it depends upon your business
strategies, but if your call centers only interact with your customers for
service while a separate organization only interacts with them for sales, how
can you even hope to provide your customers with consistent, let alone accurate
information during those interactions. Likewise, if your company is not
in some way leveraging its call centers' customer interactions for sales
purposes it is missing a great many opportunities.
9. Have you struck the right balance between effectiveness and efficiency
in the management of your centers? Are you still operating your call centers primarily as cost center
with a heavy emphasis on efficiency? Alternatively, have you found a
balance between how well and how cost-effectively they provide services to your
customers? While this balance point may move depending on the company's
success and market dynamics, it should not swing wildly back and forth.
10. How well do your call centers support your brands? All of the other questions are about the mechanics
of staffing and operating your enterprise's call centers. This question
is more of a style question for those enterprises whose call centers are
strategic. Do your call centers, and your other points of customer
interaction, deliver a consistent reinforcing branded-experience to your
customers, the Nordstrom's experience, for example?
And Now -- The Answers
You already know there are no one-size-fits-all answers to these questions.
You need to do what is right for your businesses. The questions themselves as
well as a few hints shed some light on what I think is important. However,
otherwise I apologize for raising so many questions and providing so few
recommendations. You also know the answers to most of these questions are not
to be found solely in new solutions or technologies. There are, however,
insights to be gained from the successes of leading enterprises and also
increasingly new techniques and technologies that are being applied in support
of customer contact strategies. My next column will be about proactive customer
contact and will contain more insights and recommendations than questions, I
promise.
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Over the past 15+ years as an
industry analyst
Among the types of reports Joe has authored, while working for McGraw-Hill/Datapro, Gartner, and Current Analysis are:
·
Detailed and tactical
products, services, and markets reports about automatic call distributors,
interactive voice response, voice and unified messaging, computer telephony
integration, and speech recognition
·
Strategic advisory
reports on small and mid-size business IT and mid-market customer relationship
management including Gartner's SMB CRM Magic Quadrant
·
Quantitative market
size, market share, and market growth forecast reports on small and mid-size
customer relationship management applications
·
Customer demand
reports based on large and small sample size surveys and interviews about
contact center solutions (
· Competitive analysis reports about large and mid-size contact center products, services, and markets for North American and Europe