CRM - December 2007 - (Page 37)

Approaching application design this way is a sign of “not rethinking your interaction or your business process that you’re taking with your application,” says Tom Chamberlain, director of business process marketing for Aspect Software. Shaking the Magic 8 Ball KEN LANDOLINE, SENIOR ANALYST FOR YANKEE GROUP, IS THE AUTHOR OF “THE EVOLUTION OF VOICE SELF-SERVICE SYSTEMS TO WEB ARCHITECTURES” (FEBRUARY 2007). HERE IS AN EXCERPT OF HIS TAKE ON SOME OF THE IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENTS ON THE HORIZON: Broader availability of packaged voice components. Pre-built voice selfservice components dramatically shorten the upfront development cycle and have great value. Although the voice self-service industry hyped the concept of packaged speech applications during the last few years, we have now entered a phase with more realistic expectations. Components are used to speed the application design and deployment process, but they don’t really reduce the lifecycle management expense, similar to traditional packaged software applications. Automated sources for voice component development. Transcribing recorded calls or text-based information (e.g., FAQ files) into voice components not only can reduce the initial development expense, but also can expedite the ongoing tuning. Leading vendors are applying extensive linguistic modeling tools to analyze a large base of spoken or written communications and are automatically generating voice components. Historically, developing voice applications required the “brute force” method, where developers manually mapped out what words are being said and in what order. Although these tools only do part of the job of developing a speech application, they can help reduce the TCO of managing speech. Adoption of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). VoIP further simplifies and reduces the hardware costs of voice self-service applications. Along with breaking apart the voice self-service system into a Web-based three-tier architecture, VoIP allows IT organizations increased flexibility in network designs for these systems. Increased usage in hosting and on-demand options. The voice self-service industry has a long track record of both enterprise-owned and serviceprovider–managed options. With the movement toward Web architectures, enterprises can more easily choose which tier to outsource and which to retain behind their corporate firewall. Voice self-service becoming another applications server. Voice self-service platforms and applications are moving rapidly in this direction today, and this trend will continue. 5. BE SMART ABOUT AUTOMATION It makes sense to automate frequent tasks such as obtaining stock quotes and making address changes, but steer clear of high-stress situations and tasks that are more complex or used less frequently, maintains Bern Elliot, a Gartner research vice president. “If you’re talking [about] some sensitive material as in someone’s health— maybe some health problems they’re having—they need some empathy and sympathy from the person on the other end; they don’t really want to talk to a machine,” says Paul Wirtz, Aspect’s senior director of solution services. Sometimes, he adds, the reverse is true: “It might be embarrassing and they want to check the status of something without having to interact with a person. You really have to look at each of the applications and see what the right fit is.” 6. UNDERSTAND THE LIMITATIONS OF SPEECH While it’s clear that speech technology expands what callers can do through automation, shake the notion of any extreme boost in the percentage of selfservice interactions as a result of adding speech. Instead, aim for a modest target. “If today 20 percent of the people are being handled by the IVR and you put in speech, it’s not going to jump to 95 percent,” says Sheila McGee-Smith, president and principal analyst of McGeeSmith Analytics.“But you’ll get [another] 15 percent, 25 percent—and that’s good. Don’t expect that speech is dramatically going to get you near to 100 percent because you’ll be disappointed.” 7. TEST, TEST, TEST Deploying a speech-enabled IVR may seem likely to bolster the quality of customer interactions, but taking a lackluster approach to testing the application www.destinationCRM.com will shred any chance of strengthening satisfaction levels. Andrea Holko, Intervoice’s senior vice president of global consulting services, puts the importance this way: “Usability testing, to our designers, is the same as quality assurance testing to the developers. It’s the only way we know before we go to deployment that what we designed meets [the] end users’ needs.” Additionally, there still must be ongoing governance of the system to address day-to-day issues. “It constantly needs improving and tuning,” says Daniel Hong, lead analyst of customer interaction technologies at industry research firm Datamonitor. And, by closely examining the metrics produced by the IVR platform, “companies are able to isolate where the user experience is going south,” says Miller, of Opus Research—and then they can make changes to the application. Greg Simsar, vice president of speech services at Syntellect, suggests that companies listen to live calls or leverage a callmonitoring application once the system goes into production to get a tighter grasp on how callers are interacting with the system. “If you do quality monitoring on your CSRs, why wouldn’t you be doing it on your automated calls as well?” he asks. 37 CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | DECEMBER 2007 http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - December 2007

CRM - December 2007 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity SAP’s Midmarket Design A Shift in SAP’s Growth Strategy: Buy Big to Get Bigger The Buyer Is Your Owner Prime Time for Streaming TV The Word on the Floor Market Focus: Energy/Utilities: Speaking Truth to Power (Companies) The Pulse Required Reading It’s All Coming 2.0gether Power to the People Speak Up! Document Management That's a Breeze Customers Gain Traction With Off-Road Vehicles Getting Connected With Surveys Mobile Data Gets Better Reception Secret of My Success Re:Tooling The Tipping Point Pint of View

CRM - December 2007

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