Presiding over a panel of vendor representatives at Voice 2002 speech event in Sydney today, general manager of VeCommerce, Paul Magee, caused quite a stir amongst the IT audience when he proudly announced that he was "in the business of putting people out of a job".
According to Magee, the primary reasons for speech technology deployments in businesses are to lower organisational costs and increase transaction rates in contact centres. In many cases, this may result in staff minimisation.
"It is all about replacing people and therefore lowering the costs," said Magee. "In today's environment, there is no need to apologise for this."
Magee cited a speech deployment carried out by TAB Queensland last year as an example of heavy job losses, and high returns.
According to Magee, after installing a speech technology system--in conjunction with VeCommerce--Queensland TAB recognised a 12 percent increase in transactional queries, and experienced a 35 percent decrease in staff numbers, or hours worked by remaining staff. This staff decrease, and transaction increase led to a positive return on investment.
Magee's comments received criticism from vendor representatives sharing the panel at this event including Chris Drew, chief technology officer for the contact centre group at Dimension Data Australia, and Fausto Marasco, chief executive officer for Premier Technologies.
Drew had sparked the debate with his opening comments that speech vendors were not in the "people replacement business" and re-iterated this after Magee had spoken.
"We [speech vendors] are here to automate relatively mundane things to free-up [contact centre] people for more creative processes," said Drew.
Marasco supported Drew's comments with his opinion that decreasing staff numbers in order to cut costs was not the only business consideration involved in deploying speech technology systems.
"Speech technology is a huge dollar investment, and spending a lot of dollars to cut staff numbers is not going to fly if you take it to the board," said Marasco.
"There have to be more benefits than cutting costs alone."
