Slow approach, rapid returns
Speech recognition can deliver massive benefits very quickly, but you have to take the right approach.
"If you don't design it very cleverly, you ultimately won't get the business objectives met and customers won't use the system," says Inflection Technologies' managing director, Tim Courtright.
"What you have to bring to the party is the process of guiding them from the beginning of the sales cycle to deliver the business outcomes at the end of the day."
Here are 10 pointers to get you there:
- Start small, think big: Speech recognition can do many things, but it's never a good idea to completely change your customer interaction system on short notice. Find a simple transaction that might benefit from the technology, and grow in small increments from there.
- Solicit customer feedback: Customer acceptance is the key measure of success for speech recognition. Audit customer sessions, solicit feedback and watch call volume metrics to make sure your system is intuitive and useful.
- Forget about IVR: Although speech recognition may not totally supplant IVR, it works much differently. Stop thinking in terms of limited menu cascades, and instead focus on delineating the key tasks your customers will want to carry out. Design, test, and test again to make the system as comfortable as possible.
- Remain open to change: As your speech recognition system develops, you'll realise many places where the structure could be better. Since you're not using IVR, you don't have to worry about confusing customers who have memorised specific sequences of numbers; don't hesitate to change the system for the better.
- Forecast well: You may find that speech recognition grows a lot faster than you expected. Make sure your architecture is upgraded early enough that it can comfortably accommodate increasing demand.
- Human touch still means a lot: No matter how useful speech recognition is, many callers will still want to talk to a real live human. Make sure they can get one easily-for example, by pushing * at any time.
- Integrate wisely: Speech recognition is worth nothing on its own. Make sure you inventory all of the back-end systems you might need data from, and lay down a plan to integrate the relevant ones with the speech recognition.
- Be good to your staff: Employees naturally get worried when new technology is introduced, and speech recognition is of particular concern. Instead of letting staff feel the technology will replace them, work out strategies for reassigning people to jobs they might find more interesting. With the right approach, you'll keep a positive team atmosphere and get happier, more productive employees.
- Think outside the box: Call centres may benefit the most from speech recognition, but in the long term you'll want to extend your support for speech across other customer channels. Brush up on VoiceXML as a way to speech-enable your Web site, and consider how speech recognition can be tailored to suit the specific needs of mobile and other users.
- Stay open all the time: Automated speech recognition systems are excellent at distributing often-requested information or completing standard transactions-and they do this 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with no breaks. Use this to your advantage by building speech-based services that provide value to customers even after your call centre employees have gone home.
