CRM - December 2007 - (Page 38)

GETTING LOUD AND CLEAR Part of the plan must also include adopting a gradual strategy—rather than a big-bang approach—to rolling out a speech application. Hanson cites an Avaya customer in the healthcare industry as an example. When the company rolled out its application, it did so to a small subset of its customer base, informing them that they would see a change in their interaction with the voice system. The strategy produced useful feedback on customer sentiments about the application.“It really is rolling it out using a strict change-management methodology to a small group of people, understanding their likes and dislikes, adjusting, and expanding it to a larger portfolio of customers as it’s rolled out,” Hanson says. previously used, or order the same number of tickets as before. Through the application, customers can then purchase tickets and place orders quickly; sidestep lengthy queues by providing movie information; and select seats. During the last two years, the VoiceWeb application has served more than 500,000 unique users and automated about 80 percent of customer calls. owners. “The whole idea is to try and get the company to come at it from a user point of view,” Syntellect’s Simsar says. “Going through that process really opens up your mind to the different types of people calling your system.” 8. GET PERSONAL Like any component of a customercentric strategy, using a one-size-fits-all formula will make initiatives stale. Use customer data to deliver a more tailored call flow.“In the best system it’s based on their [Automatic Number Identification]/Caller ID, so that even before the system plays the very first prompt it knows who the caller is,” says Steven Brown, vice president of client services for Angel.com. “But if the Caller ID is not used and it’s some other identifying piece of information—might be an account number—then use that information to provide a personalized set of menu options back to the caller.” Consider the path taken by Australiabased media and entertainment company Village Roadshow, which operates multiplexes in various countries. In June 2005, VR launched VoiceWeb Ticketing, a hosted speech-enabled IVR built on Envox Worldwide’s Envox Communications Development Platform and Nuance’s speech recognition functionality. The deployment features automatic town recognition based on phone number; customer identification/credit-card clearing; natural language understanding featuring multiple commands; and call logs and statistics. Once a caller has been identified, the system can pose tailored questions such as whether the customer would like to use the credit-card number 38 Don’t look at a speech-enabled IVR in a vacuum. Scrutinize how customers interact with you via all contact channels. 9. USE PROFESSIONAL TALENT All too often, companies miss a key element of the overall feel of a speech system: the particular voice used for the recordings. Use professional talent to add to the finesse of the system. “What touches the caller is the quality of your recordings, so it’s very important to have a professional recording done and to use as much as possible the same voice talent across the speech application rather than different voices,” Genesys’ Shankar says. 10. CREATE USER PROFILES Not all of your customers are alike, and speech recognition initiatives often require an understanding of the demographic makeup of your customer base. Design profiles to describe user segments, attaching characteristics that will provide customer visibility. Convergys’ Smith says that, on average, three user profiles are probably enough. Assign identifying traits to make it “a living and breathing person,” Smith says. “You create these people and you create a true meaning behind the term user.” Take, as an example, a utility company. “Reggie” may be a consumer with one residence, “Elizabeth” may split her time between two units, and “Marie” may represent commercial property 11. EXAMINE THE MULTICHANNEL MIX For most companies, the days of interacting with customers solely through the telephone are a distant memory. With the emergence of channels such as email, Web chat, and online self-service, call centers attempt to cultivate customer relationships while evolving into multichannel, multipurpose contact centers. Rather than looking at a speech-enabled IVR in a vacuum, scrutinize how customers interact with your company through all of the service channels offered. But pump the brakes if you’re thinking about applying the same design principles for a graphical user interface to a VUI. For instance, a Web site can feature a pull-down menu with multiple options, but that structure in a phone self-service environment would cause chaos. Where it makes sense, though, take a page from the playbook of other touch points— perhaps with something as simple as making sure your speech-enabled IVR uses the same terms as those listed on the Web site, and in the same order. “You get ideas of how the customer is used to being communicated to,” Smith says. Moreover, seamlessly integrating channels, although a daunting task, is a key ingredient to not just the success of a speech application, but to customer satisfaction overall. “There needs to be a bigger emphasis on the consolidation of consumer data,” says Ken Landoline, senior analyst for Yankee Group. With a consolidated database, he adds, customer activity ends up in one bucket, as it should, regardless of whether that activity took place on the Web or through an IVR, and regardless of whether that IVR had speech capability or not. “On the front end, that’s recorded in the same place, so there’s always a 360-degree view of the customer across the channels,” he says. Contact editor@destinationCRM.com. www.destinationCRM.com CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | DECEMBER 2007 http://Angel.com 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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