Author:  Roger Sumner

In my last blog, I mentioned the importance of meeting your customers’ needs with your self-service system.  This is a two-fold challenge.  Of course you need to design your system so that you are providing the information that will meet your customers’ needs.  But, you also need to make it as easy as possible for your customers to navigate their way through your system so that they can access that information. 

Designing an optimal self-service system is a process that takes research and time, and is specific to your company’s industry, company culture, as well as the wants and needs of your customers. You can give your customers the option of touchtone, speech, or both.  But, in order to make things as simple as you can for your customers, you might want to think about using speech recognition in conjunction with speech self-service. By analyzing and understanding human languages, speech recognition can enable your customers to have “conversations” with your voice solution in the same way they would converse with your agents – using complete sentences to ask and answer questions. Some things, like your customers’ account numbers or credit card information, may still require DTMF detection for security reasons.   

While speech recognition has been available in some form or another for quite some time, in recent years algorithms have become significantly more advanced.  As a result, the quality of automated interactions has vastly improved, and the cost of the software has decreased.  These factors, combined with the fact that customer perception of your automated system can greatly impact your business, may mean that it’s time for you to think about deploying speech recognition in your contact center.  

Do you think your center is focusing enough energy on self service?  Are you giving your customers a direct route to the information they need, or are you sending them on an annoying wild goose chase? If the latter, you could be at risk for losing valuable customers.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 at 6:32 am and is filed under Contact Center Technology, Customer Service/Consumer Demands, Performance Optimization, Sales and Telemarketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.