Cacophony

Ah…SpeechTek in New York City amid the frenetic activity of hustlers and buskers, business suits and Bermuda shirted tourists of every size, shape and nationality imaginable. What a backdrop for a convention dedicated to trends and technology for Speech IVR applications!

The noise quotient roars in the background—cars and trucks and ambulances and construction and people. It is a voice designer’s nightmare. All of this din competing with the caller’s voice for the hapless speech recognizer to filter, parse and manage to return a reasonable response. And yet, that is the focus of this conference—how to reach and engage the new mobile user—the customer of our future. And this includes dealing with these very conditions. So what seemed dichotomous proves to be a perfect setting.

How will we serve this new breed? Our industry is maturing; the rush for better and better technology is evolving to a new focus on how to do what we do better—how to target and respond in new ways to the challenge of communicating with and selling to these tech savvy, in a hurry, high energy and strongly individualistic people. Turning the clock back in time to see that in choosing machine over personal service, we have taken away the very reason that we need and want to interact with each as customer and vendor.

Once upon a time, when you wanted to speak with someone about something, you went to them, and asked them your question. If they were not available, there was someone there who knew where they were, when they would return, and very likely, be able to answer your question or address your concern for you—personal contact, in a direct context.

In today’s IVR environment, we have a one size fits all response through which the caller must wade step by step, without regard for what she actually needs or wants. She must sit impatiently through menus, marketing messages and jargon before selecting the option of interest. What a waste!

In the brave new IVR of the future, we want to see a return to the personal service that comes from an understanding of the caller–using caller history, reverse ANI matching and demographic information behind the scenes to offer pertinent options and messages, and then displaying them in a multimodal way that allows the caller to respond and track that information in a way that is meaningful and useful for them. The message is “It is all about me. I am The Customer!” That is the voice that rises about all the sound and fury here in New York.

Reducing your IVR footprint using Speech may decrease your risk of cancer and save the planet?

Datamonitor recently put out a report that talked about the value of hosted speech and describes the “IVR footprint”.

“At the end of 2004, revenues from the hosted and premise-based managed IVR market in North America were just north of $1.9 billion. As a result of its large IVR footprint, traditional IVR accounted for the majority, or 78.2%, of revenues. Voice-XML accounted for 21.8% of revenues”

When they refer to Voice-XML I believe they are referring to Speech-based IVR. So it tells me that old-fashioned DTMF based IVR is still in heavy use and Speech is slowly getting acceptance.

It got me thinking about how we are being told by Al Gore and the media that our “carbon footprint” is fueling global warming, polluting the air and generally destroying the environment. I did not come up with an immediate solution to this problem, but I saw a new report from the Univ. of Pittsburg this morning that declares yet again the theory that radio waves from cell phones may be causing brain cancer and I felt there might be a connection. Most people have already decided where they stand on climate change; some people fear cell phone radio waves (did you see the fake YouTube ads?).

Let’s assume that both have some modicum of truth - so how are they related and, you may wonder, how does Speech IVR play a part in the solution?

We can cycle to work (25 miles for me…) turn down the A/C, stop drinking bottled water from the island of Java and use speakerphones but how can we focus our business investments on solving these issues?

We know that IVR works well for routing calls to the right agents in a call center and capturing a limited amount of data. Does traditional IVR reduce call time? In some cases yes, in most cases maybe not. However we do know that using a well-designed Speech application in many cases will reduce call time significantly simply by allowing a more conversational interaction with the IVR, a more efficient presentation of the needed information and as a result very little, if any, agent interaction.

So here’s the basic theory: If we can reduce the amount of time a caller spends on the phone, which includes how long they spend with an agent, then they will be exposed to fewer radio waves from their cell phone. As a result of the reduced call time, companies will be able to use fewer agents which will mean smaller facilities, less people on the road and a reduced carbon footprint overall.

Does this sound either a bit off the wall or possibly too good to be true? Is there a catch? Back to that Datamonitor report:

“The relatively high costs of speech have deterred many businesses from investment. As a result, a number of these businesses have looked to hosting to leverage the benefits of speech without having to put forward the heavy upfront costs for a speech solution. For these businesses the hosted model minimizes cost, time and risk for speech application development, tuning and expansion”.

So there you have it! Help save the planet, reduce your callers’ risk of cancer and spend less money to boot. Take a look at your IVR footprint and your agent footprint. Would the simple implementation of a hosted Speech IVR solution reduce your call time by even 10%? It may well make a difference.

I’d love to hear some comments. Am I on to something here? After all a year ago everyone thought hybrid cars were weird and only for the tree-huggers…how times change!

Next time we’ll look to see whether Speech can turn around the economy, reduce the price of gas and get our troops out of Iraq…stayed tuned.