Speech Technology - October 2008 - (Page 23)

SPEECH & EMOTION Companies to Call Sponsored Content Ziv recommends keeping the survey quick—preferably no more than three questions—and to the point. Then you can match the survey to the call and identify what’s driving people to give high or low scores, he says. “Agents can learn the relevant skills needed to handle emotional situations by real-life examples,” Ziv says. In general, emotional calls occur much less frequently than regular calls, but tend to make a much bigger splash. That’s because, according to behavioral psychologists, a loss often feels two to two-anda-half times worse than a gain of similar magnitude. Applied to the contact center, a bad customer experience will likely attract more negative exposure than a positive response, making it critical for CSRs to be properly trained. It has been Liberman’s observation that most people tend to confuse stress and anger. Stress, he says, is derived from feeling trapped. Anger, on the other hand, translates into: “I’m trapped, but I’m getting out no matter what.” Knowing this, Nemesysco’s solution tracks the development of stress and anger separately. “When a customer calls to complain about something, he expects to find empathy,” Liberman says. “Once he doesn’t find it, his frustration is growing bigger, and so will his stress.” That is genuine emotion, and the key is to get in before the point of no return, right before stress turns to anger, he notes. All in Real Time Ideally, emotion detection will one day be used to provide real-time intervention. “If you can turn around a situation, you’ve made a friend versus an enemy,” Fluss says. Solve the problem proactively, rather than having to clean up the mess after a customer has defaced your brand across blogs, Twitter, or any of the many other social networking channels that continue to pop up, she suggests. NICE Systems has opted for the term “interaction analytics” to encapsulate the variety of channels through which call centers are connecting with customers beyond speech, such as faxes, email, and live chat sessions. “When you’re interacting with a call center, you’re doing it in real time, but what does a call center do in most cases?” Fluss asks. “It goes back to reactive processes and procedures. It doesn’t take advantage of that real-time interaction.” Though assuaging an emotional caller during the time of the call is an attractive possibility, questions of practicality prove to be a hindrance. Intervening in real time requires an extensively networked environment and infrastructure, which can be undoubtedly intensive and expensive. Even if a supervisor were to intervene at every roadblock, customers don’t like having to repeat their stories over again, Ziv says. With some call centers receiving 200,000 calls a day, he says, real-time intervention is just not possible. Companies can take a quasiproactive approach by identifying the root cause of calls a few hours after the initial onset and then resolving the situation before more calls start coming in. At the 2008 eTail East conference in Washington, Finlay Robb, chief marketing officer of LEGO Group’s Global Direct to Consumer Division, recounted a situation where the company began getting calls complaining about being double-billed. LEGO then began contacting customers who were potentially affected, alerting them to the mistake and apologizing. In addition, the company offered a certificate worth 5 euros. With the exception of one woman who attempted to sue the company, Robb says he was surprised by the number of customers who actually thanked the company for the notification. To Janet Ryan, director of call center operations at AAA Washington, real-time intervention sounds like a great opportunity, but she doesn’t see it taking hold in a meaningful way—at least not right now. During peak driving season, AAA Washington receives approximately 5,000 calls a day. The majority of those calls come from its Emergency Road Service, and nearly all callers are emotional. At her call center, Ryan is characterized as having “dog ears.” Standing over her agents, she is acutely attuned to the differences between volume and emotion—a IVR systems are definitely transforming the way you interact with your customers. Yet you still face immense challenges to create and manage truly dynamic and personalized automated dialogs that are suited to the requirements, context or preferences of the caller. HDA Intelligent IVR allows for greater call automation, dramatically increasing customer satisfaction and customer retention. Integrating with all VXML compliant IVR systems, HDA Intelligent IVR allows you to update dialog systems in seconds. And our unique solution for managing dynamic responses, allows you to produce on-the-fly call flows, and to personalize every customer interaction. If you’d like to find out more about how HDA Intelligent IVR is changing the way organizations are building their next generation dynamic voice applications, please visit us at www.intelligentivr.com. H-care Srl Tenuta Ca’ Tron Via Sile, 51 31056 Roncade (Treviso), Italy Tel. +39 0422789613 Email: sales@h-care.it Web: www.h-care.it www.speechtechmag.com http://www.intelligentivr.com http://www.intelligentivr.com http://www.h-care.it http://www.speechtechmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Speech Technology - October 2008

Speech Technology - October 2008 Contents Editor’s Letter Industry View Inside Outsourcing Interact Keynoter Highlights the Shrinking Technological World Former Hacker Tackles IVR and Biometrics ‘Press 1’ for Caller Thoughts Soundbytes Voice Vote A New Dragon Emerges Overheard/Underheard An Emotional Mess Emotional Intelligence The Case for Call Recording Unified in Care and Communications An Education in E-Learning Guest Column Standards Speech Solutions Voice Value Forward Thinking

Speech Technology - October 2008

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