Building a business case
In a time when IT purse strings are being tightened across the board, it's rare to find an application that offers such certain and substantial return on investment.
The benefits come in many ways, all of which have quickly made NLSR a priority item on the agendas of business and technology executives alike.
Perhaps the biggest savings come when call centre operators are freed of the burden of being a go-between between the customer and the company's information systems.
Within months of implementation earlier this year, for example, Telstra's voice-driven directory assistance system had taken over around 15 percent of the millions of calls to the service every day.
By reducing the time customers spend talking with customer service representatives, speech recognition can increase the number of customer calls that can be handled in an hour, eliminate waiting times, and increase transaction volumes.
It also allows any company to service many customer requests 24 hours a day, seven days a week without needing to keep real people in the call centre. It does not take coffee breaks, go home at night or go on strike.
Because of its benefits, speech recognition can be a seriously profitable new channel that also improves the customer experience--two points that should make it easy to build a business case for NLSR.
Savings may come through factors such as reduced staffing levels, fewer rostered shifts or reductions in the expense of company-paid 1300 or 1800 lines.
NLSR's financial benefits should increase its appeal to any executive board, as will the technology's exceptional ROI model: typical return on investment for speech recognition projects is less than 12 months. This target has even been exceeded by many of the technology's early adopters, confirming its status as a way of rapidly expanding the business.
"People obviously see the business case behind it, but the only way a CEO will listen to a vendor about voice recognition is when they start talking ROI and dollars," says Luke Chambers, marketing manager of speech recognition integrator CallTime Solutions, which purchased Sayso!'s intellectual property earlier this year and recently received a AU$3.6 million Federal grant for developing speech recognition applications.
Fortunately, this is easy to do because it's relatively easy to distil the potential benefits of speech recognition down to a simple number. You know how many calls your agents are handling and how long they stay on the phone; you know how much the servers for a NLSR solution will cost.
Simply compare your current cost per human-assisted call second with the potential cost of a shorter, automated call and it should be clear to see how quickly NLSR will deliver big savings.
"Some businesses have saved up to AU$6000 per call second per year by reducing the handling of calls," says Tim Courtright, managing director of Melbourne-based speech integrator Inflection Technologies.
"A lot of calls going to call centre agents are low-value transactions where talking to the agent doesn't add anything to the experience for the business or for the customer.
If you can help the customer in 60 to 90 seconds on a speech system as opposed to 180 seconds using IVR (interactive voice response-using the phone keypad to enter numbers or navigate menus with pre-recorded responses) or a person, you're saving the customer time and the company money."
Speech recognition also provides non-financial benefits. Because call centre staffers aren't stuck handling boring, routine transactions, for example, they can get involved in more interesting aspects of customer care such as loyalty programs, strategic marketing, and administration.
Providing more interesting work has already been shown to reduce staff churn--a real problem of call centre operators who have grown tired of investing in staff training only to watch talent get bored and leave.
This was a major benefit for Auckland Co-op Taxis, which has seen what chairman & CEO Robert van Heiningen calls "a significant drop of turnover" since implementing speech recognition earlier this year (see sidebar). "People are sticking with us longer than ever before," he reports.
