Adding the Customer to the Call Center's Quality Equation

by: Greg Levin

Topics: Quality Monitoring

Description: Can you truly say your contact center's quality monitoring centers on the customer
experience when you're not capturing the voice of the customer?

In today’s contact centers, the term “customer experience” is used more liberally than a bottle of SPF 50
at a beach party for redheads. This is particularly true when managers are talking about their quality
monitoring programs. While they truly believe that their monitoring efforts are all about ensuring a
positive customer experience, the truth is that the customer’s perspective and opinions are typically left
out of the quality equation.

Consider the typical quality monitoring approach: quality assurance (QA) personnel listen to and rate
calls – scoring agents on two major components: 1) how well they comply with the company’s policies
and procedures (as well as the accuracy of information provided); and 2) how courteous, helpful and
professional the agent was during the interaction.

Now, take a closer look at the second component – shouldn’t the customers themselves be the true
judge of such agent behaviors and performance attributes? Asking a supervisor or QA specialist to rate
how satisfied a customer was with an agents’ performance is the equivalent of asking a waiter or a chef
to rate how a diner liked his or her meal.

Following this traditional monitoring approach, centers provide agents with coaching and feedback that
doesn’t always gel with actual customer expectations and preferences, causing customer satisfaction
ratings to plateau at “mediocre” – despite the center’s heavy investment in quality monitoring resources.

None of that will change until centers start incorporating the “voice of the customer” (VOC) into their QA
program via post-contact transactional customer surveys, says Mike Desmarais, founder and president
of Service Quality Measurement (SQM) Group, a Canadian firm specializing in QA services for call
centers.

“Traditional quality assurance is limited in terms of its impact on how it can help companies run their call
centers. Our research has shown it to have no real impact on [customer satisfaction] performance. Call
centers would rather take ownership for judging the customer experience than actually letting the
customer be the judge. However, customers should be the main judge of call quality – and centers do
that by integrating the ‘voice of the customer’ with the compliance aspect of the traditional QA process.”

Call Centers Listening to the Voice of the Customer

The thought of revamping the entire monitoring process may cause minor panic attacks among
managers already challenged to do more with less in the current economy. However, such fears will
likely be assuaged when these managers hear about the results achieved by organizations that have
already adopted a VOC-based QA program and when they learn that doing so is not as challenging as it
may seem.

Rogers Communications Customer Care (based in Toronto, with centers throughout Canada) “added
the customer” to their QA efforts in the summer of 2007 – a move that has elevated the organization to
elite status. Since implementing its “My Customer” program, Rogers reports a whopping eight-point
improvement in its top-box customer satisfaction rate on the cable side of the business, and a healthy
two-point improvement on the wireless side. In addition, Rogers has seen a significant improvement in
agent performance and quality. Due to such success, in 2008 Rogers implemented the My Customer
program at its National Technical Service Delivery (NTSD) centers, which handle tech support issues

“The ‘My Customer’ program is a primary initiative and listening post that enables and extends our
coaching capability while driving toward an industry-leading customer experience,” says Roland
Pauksens, senior vice president of National Customer Care for Rogers.

Other organizations – including Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), GE Capital Solutions, and Amex Bank of
Canada – have reported similar results since adding a VOC component to their quality monitoring and
coaching programs.

Of course, you don’t achieve such results overnight. Successfully moving from a traditional monitoring
program to a VOC-based QA initiative requires careful planning and a clear understanding not only of
best practices in quality monitoring, coaching and customer satisfaction measurement, but also of how
these elements all fit together.

Following are the key tactics and strategies embraced by centers that have effectively added the
customer to the quality equation.

Administer a concise and timely transactional survey to capture the voice of the customer – and
tie the results to individual agents. Using either an automated (IVR- or email-based) post-contact
survey or one administered by a live person via phone, top centers are able to capture the customer’s
experience and direct feedback on agent performance immediately (or within a few hours) after the
interaction has taken place. Some centers opt to conduct the post-contact surveys in-house, while
others use a third-party surveying specialist, of which there are many. Either way, Desmarais
recommends administering the survey in the same channel through which the customer contacted the
center – i.e., an IVR-based survey or live phone survey for customers who called the center, and an
email-based survey for customers who interacted with an agent via email or chat.

Transactional surveys are typically quite brief – five to seven questions – and focus on such things as:
the customer’s overall satisfaction with the call center (wait times, IVR experience, call routing, etc.),
satisfaction with the agent, and whether or not the customer’s issue was resolved.

At Amex Bank of Canada, the questions regarding the agent get pretty specific (without making the
overall survey too long) to elicit invaluable feedback for agents. “We ask customers to rate the agent on
knowledge and authority, communication, whether the caller was treated as a valued customer, as well
as on listening and understanding,” says Lucy Panacci, project analyst for Amex Bank of Canada’s Line
Optimization Team.

At most contact centers with VOC process in place, survey response options feature one or more of the
following:
•rating scale (e.g., 1-5);
•a satisfaction scale (“very satisfied”, “satisfied”, “neutral”, “dissatisfied”, “very dissatisfied); or
•an agreement scale (strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, strongly disagree) – depending on how
the question is posed.

The best surveys also feature a couple of open-ended questions that give customers the opportunity to
provide detailed responses or to elaborate on previous ones. A best practice, according to Desmarais, is
to follow up any question for which the customer signified strong satisfaction or strong dissatisfaction
with an open-ended question intended to capture the reasons behind such responses.
Dr. Jodie Monger, president of Customer Relationship Metrics, agrees, and adds that open ended
questions not only uncover causes of strong satisfaction/dissatisfaction; they help to reveal customer’s
response errors. For instance, a customer might score an agent with a “1” on a scale of 1-5 thinking that
“1” is the highest rating, when it’s really the lowest. “By reviewing the customer comments along with the
survey scores during the quality control process,” Dr. Monger explains, “it would become apparent that
the negative score was a mistake.”

Of course, the key to any successful VOC-based QA program is how the survey results tie into the
monitoring and coaching process – something we will cover in the next two sections.

Use internal quality monitoring methods to measure compliance only. In leading centers, once a
customer survey is complete, the numeric scores as well as any verbatim comments from the customer
are sent to a QA specialist in the contact center, who then accesses the recorded call* (or email/chat
transcript) in question and, with monitoring form in hand, scores the agent solely on the compulsory
compliance issues – how they handled the objective, non-negotiable requirements of the interaction.
Examples include whether or not the agent used the proper greeting and closing (and followed other key
script components; adhered to company- or industry-defined privacy/security policies; imparted
correct/accurate information. In centers whose call monitoring system “records” screen activity, QA staff
can also evaluate how effectively agents filled in data and moved in and out of appropriate screens.

(*Note: For phone interactions, finding the call in question is made easy by today’s quality monitoring
systems, most of which have a customer survey feature that links completed surveys to recorded calls.)

The monitoring forms used by QA staff are generally concise and straightforward, with a simple “yes” or
“no” option for most of the criteria. For example, “Did the agent use the customer’s name during the call
greeting?”

By taking this compliance approach to monitoring, and having the call recording or text transcript on
hand for agents to hear/read, the call center greatly reduces the problem of agents refuting or rejecting
how a QA specialist scored them on a contact – a common occurrence in many centers.

But the real performance impact comes when the customer scores and feedback are factored in and
shared with the agent, which brings us to how customer ratings and comments are incorporated into
agent monitoring scores and feedback.

Effectively incorporate customer ratings and verbatim comments into agent monitoring scores
and feedback. After completing the compliance evaluation for the agent, the center’s QA specialist
determines the agent’s overall quality score by combining the compliance score with the customer rating
from the survey, taking any weighting issues into consideration.

Desmarais recommends a 70/30 split – “70% of the total quality points on the customer side, 30% on
the compliance side.” Rogers Communications has achieved its previously mentioned VOC success
with a 60/40 split. “Sixty percent of an agent’s individual quality score is based on the caller’s customer
satisfaction rating,” explains Rod Cook, director of customer advocacy and quality at Rogers’ Customer
Care center, “with the remaining 40% based on how well the agent fulfilled certain essential call
elements, as determined by the QA analyst using a clear-cut monitoring form.”

At Rogers and most other centers with a VOC-based QA initiative, once the QA person determines the
overall quality score, they send it – along with the customer survey results, the compliance score sheet
and the call recording (or text transcript) – to the agent’s supervisor or team leader, whoever typically
provides coaching. The QA person might highlight any notable results, whether positive or negative, that
he or she feels the supervisor should focus on. The supervisor then schedules a feedback session with
the agent in question to go over the results and provide any necessary coaching, as well as deserved
praise.

Ask any manager or supervisor in call center that has adopted a VOC-based QA initiative, and they’ll tell
you that their agents are much more motivated by direct customer feedback than they are by
supervisor/team lead feedback.

“Because we hire people who care about people, our agents take customer feedback to heart, says
Cook of Rogers Communications. “They see it as being valuable as well as fair and objective.
Comments are played back for agents during the feedback session, and because it’s actually the voice
of the customer, it resonates with the agent much more than if such feedback was coming just from the
[team manager] alone.”

“It’s a huge motivator,” says Panacci of Amex Bank of Canada. “This is direct feedback from the
customer – how the customer perceived the agent’s performance; there’s no issue of an agent feeling
that they received biased feedback from a supervisor. When our agents get positive feedback from a
customer, they are so pleased and driven to continue such performance, and if the customer wasn’t
satisfied with something about their performance, agents are highly motivated to improve in that area.”

The direct customer feedback doesn’t just benefit the agent who handled the contact: Most centers use
such feedback (along with the recording/transcript) as a coaching and training tool for other agents. For
example, if an agent at Rogers Communications has an exemplary call, the center may use the call
recording along with the positive customer rating and feedback to demonstrate to trainees not only what
great service “looks” like, but also how it impacts the customer experience.

Involve agents in the management of the process. To further ensure the success of their VOC-based
QA programs, top centers actively involve agents in the implementation of maintenance of the initiative.
As Panacci explains, moving from a traditional quality monitoring program to a VOC-based one
represents a big shift; thus, it’s critical to get agents’ input and support early on. “Because this was a
huge change management piece, the communication with our agents was very thorough and delicate,”
Panacci explains. “We clearly explained the objective of the [program]. We also held several meetings
where we had agents listen to calls, then we shared the customer survey results with the agents so they
could see how customers rated the calls. This helped agents to see how their service impacts the
customer, and what drives a ‘top box’ score.”

At Rogers Communications, agents have played an important role in the implementation and
maintenance the center’s My Customer initiative – provided invaluable feedback and recommendations
that have led to important changes and improvements to the customer survey questions and the
center’s monitoring form. “Agents are very much involved in the success of the program,” says Cook.

Commit to Listening to Your Customers

Organizations are always talking the talk of “the customer experience”; relatively few, however, walk
that talk when it comes to their monitoring practices. Many call centers back away from a true VOC-
based QA initiative because it involves transferring a lot of control from the contact center over to the
customer. Desmarais acknowledges that this can be a large and scary undertaking from a management
perspective, but he implores organizations to take this next step, and, in fact, is unsympathetic toward
those that don’t.
“If you truly believe that the voice of the customer should be a critical measure, if you believe that your
primary purpose is to be a world class call center and to provide great customer service, then why don’t
you commit to this? Why don’t you change the way you traditionally do things with regard to quality?
The payoff in terms of customer and agent satisfaction make it hard not to.”

Seven Trends in Quality Monitoring

by: Harry Sheff

Topics: Quality Monitoring

Description: The companies that make quality monitoring software tell us what's new and what to look
for in the future.

Call recording has come a long way. Agents are not nearly as apprehensive about it as they used to be.
Cheap data storage led to 100% recording, which led to speech analytics; automatic training and real-
time coaching are more popular now and the rest of the enterprise is starting to see the wealth of useful
data that comes out of the call center via quality monitoring systems.

We talked to a lot of the industry's quality monitoring vendors and asked them what was new. The
consensus is the technology is getting so good that it isn't the weak link anymore. In some cases it's a
matter of catching call centers up, not just on the latest technology, but some of the old stuff, too. Rick
Daley, vice president of sales and marketing for Columbus, Ohio-based CallCopy told us, "Someone
once said 'the next big thing is making the last big thing usable' and I think that is the case in regard to
quality monitoring applications." That's apt. "Please spend time looking at your processes," pleads
Witness Systems' (Roswell, GA) quality monitoring expert Oscar Alban. "Because if you surround a
recording product with very poor processes, you're not going to get a lot out of it."

So what is new? And what's important in the call recording and quality monitoring side of the call center
universe? We know total recording is becoming the norm. As one vendor told us, the price of recording
everything is so low now, there's no reason not to record everything. With the help of some of the
industry's leading vendors, we've spotted some more trends. Some will confirm what you know or
thought. Others may be a revelation.

Trend one: Less big brother-style punishment, more training. Agent complaints about their
supervisors using the quality monitoring system to spy on them have diminished in the last few years.
Part of it went away with the advent of 100% recording: now it's constant -- less like a pop quiz.

With total recording comes more targeted training and coaching, which means agents can see how
recording helps them. As Verint's (Melville, NY) vice president of global marketing Mariann McDonagh
told us, "At the end of the day, the agent is happier because the business is supporting them to do their
job." She continued, "As the solutions have matured, and space has matured over time, that's become
less of an issue because there is definitely more direct benefit to the agents."

If agents complain these days, it's more likely that the call center is using recordings to punish, or that
they're not doing a good job showing how recording can help. Roger Lee, business consulting director
for Irving, Texas-based etalk says he spends a lot of time with call center executives going over the
message and purpose of call monitoring. "Sometimes, it's not very clear. There's not a clear direction or
definition of why we monitor the agent. There are perceptions, and as you well know, if the perception is
not positive, it takes a lot of work to overturn that perception," Lee says. "It is a tool that's meant help
and coach an agent's performance. But there's a lot of work that needs to be done to make sure you're
consistent with that. It's not a 'gotcha' tool."

Mercom's (Lyndhurst, NJ) Kristyn Emenecker takes that one step further: "It should really be viewed as
employee development and career development," she says, noting that call monitoring can help agents
grow and prepare for more responsibility in the call center. "As call centers and businesses in general
learn to use these [tools] in that method, we're limiting, at least, and minimizing the amount of that big
brother fear that comes along with it."

Trend two: Greater market penetration. Most vendors we talked to say about half of call centers in the
U.S. use some kind of quality monitoring system. If that sounds low, consider the fact that some of those
centers are still using tapes to record selected interactions. Cheaper data storage should begin to bring
the technology to the smaller centers that are still using tape because they think they can't afford more
advanced systems.

The market is just opening up for speech analytics, too. Mercom's Kristyn Emenecker thinks the industry
is still in the early phase of adoption for this technology. "It's the larger companies that have adopted it,
those with more money. I think we're going to see the prices come down. I think there's a lot of interest,
but we're going to start to see it being actually installed and utilized within, say, the mid-sized market,
which really hasn't touched it yet," she says.

Trend three: Quality monitoring systems are being used to help the rest of the enterprise. It's not
just for the call center anymore says Envision's (Seattle, WA) chief evangelist Connie Smith. "Now
people are actually listening to those calls in the enterprise to not just look at agent skills, but broken
prospects, product failure, shipment delays, other things that affect the customer within the enterprise."
To Smith, this is the "holy grail" for the rest of the enterprise, but they might not know it yet.

Adds Smith: "It's slow to adopt. Not that it's difficult to; it's just that you're now engaging the rest of your
business and other CRM applications to now talk to each other and to make sure you're getting the most
out of these interactions, and you've got to get the marketing group involved and you've got to explain to
them why it's important to them."

Says Kristyn Emenecker of Mercom: "We've seen [marketing departments] really start to understand
how much data and how much value they have in their very own customer service department, probably
down the hall, that they've never tapped into. In marketing we spend lots and lots of dollars on focus
groups and on surveys -- all these things to get our customers to talk to us -- when here we have
customers talking to us all day long in that call center down the hallway."

Oscar Alban of Witness Systems confirms that this is what software developers see as the technology's
biggest potential. "Literally, a call can be monitored and used for multiple reasons," he says.
"[Businesses] are monitoring transactions across the enterprise to identify root cause issues -- what's
causing customers to be transferred four times, what's causing customers to call back on these
particular issues on a consistent basis -- because the contact center may be the recipient, why the
customer's calling in, but the owner of the root cause lies somewhere else in the organization." This is
big -- it means the call center is finally proving its worth to the rest of the enterprise.
Roger Lee of etalk says looking at quality monitoring from a business-centric point of view rather than
merely an agent-centric view is the next level for this software. The question, Lee says, is "How do we
take this information that we're gathering and listening to and really uncover opportunities to increase
revenue?"

"There's agent quality and enterprise quality," Verint's Mariann McDonagh told us. "Agent quality is
about that specific interaction. Enterprise quality is applying that interaction or taking a wider lens to
[ask] 'what does this really mean?' And 'how can the business be optimized to deliver a better result to
our customers at the end of the day?'"

It isn't just that the information these systems collect from customer/agent interactions is being used by
the rest of the enterprise; the rest of the enterprise is beginning to be monitored as well. Like Witness's
Oscar Alban, Anton Greiersen, vice president of global sales for the German call monitoring software
firm ASC Telecom told us that all enterprise communication could benefit from electronic scrutiny. "Any
kind of standardized communication -- to employees, partners, etc. -- needs attention and fine-tuning.
So, your entire company should be engaged in a detailed, enterprise-wide QM approach," he says.
"Instead of just evaluating call content, the processing of a complaint or request should be tracked and
scored. In the future, QM will be closely integrated with business optimization."

Trend Four: Further integration with other systems. In the beginning, there was just call recording. It
was done because it had to be done for regulatory or compliance reasons. Later, there was random
recording for "quality assurance purposes." Now, with most vendors offering full-time recording, speech
analytics systems can help categorize calls and bring relevant interactions to supervisors' attention.

"In reality, there isn't really a beginning or an end with regard to quality monitoring solutions. Call
recording, quality monitoring, agent coaching, speech analytics, performance management, and
customer survey solutions should work in harmony with each other," Patrick Botz, global director of
marketing for Camarillo, California-based Voice Print International told us. With more efficient methods
for finding calls, training and coaching is easier. It also means training systems are becoming essential
parts of the quality monitoring system.

"There is a very fine line between quality monitoring and training/coaching," says Rick Daley of
CallCopy. "If you are monitoring your quality but you are not poised to reward your top performers and
coach those who are not meeting your standards, you are missing out on the true benefit of your quality
monitoring application." However, Daley considers speech analytics a separate and non-essential piece:
"A quality monitoring system can be quite effective without speech analytics."

Companies like Witness view quality monitoring and its accompanying speech analytics and training
tools as components in a greater "workforce optimization" suite, along with workforce and performance
management tools. Companies like Verint concentrate on the agent's performance. NICE Systems offer
everything, including workforce management.

Trend Five: Coordinating screen capture with call recordings. Total recording was made possible
by advances in data storage. It's natural that it wouldn't be just the voice recordings that get stored --
now the agent's screen activity is being stored as well, and its being connected and synchronized to the
call recordings. There are many benefits to keeping track of agents' screen activity.

"Once upon a time," says Mercom's Kristyn Emenecker, "If I was scoring a call and all I heard was the
audio for that call, if there was a lot of dead air, a lot of pausing, I didn't know -- I probably marked the
agent down for it -- I didn't know what the situation was. I didn't know if it was because they were having
computer problems, they were not able to pull up the right information. I really didn't know what was
going on. Whereas with being able to view their desktop, I have a much better understanding of the root
cause of that issue, so that it can be addressed appropriately."

CallCopy's Rick Daley: "Systems administrators and IT can benefit from desktop screen capture by
validating PC performance (when the agent says, 'hold on, my computer is running slow' you can see if
they are waiting on an application or if they are surfing the Web, etc.)." But it's not just good for checking
up on agents. "If you are using several applications (CRM, knowledge base, order tracking, etc.)
throughout each call you may identify better methods to toggle through those applications based on
your call flow," Daley told us.

Trend Six: Adding post-call customer survey information to agent evaluations. Using information
from customer surveys can be another way to flag calls, too. According to Voice Print's Patrick Botz,
"Customer feedback automatically directs users to the important call recordings to listen to, rather than
randomly selecting calls. Users can trigger alerts based on what customers say about a specific call, or
based on aggregate feedback at any level in the organization."

Trend Seven: With increased automation comes increased responsibility. Yes, these systems are
becoming increasingly automated. But the vendors tell us that call centers shouldn't rely on automation
to do your work for you -- that's not what it's for.

"It doesn't take action by itself. It presents data to an individual who needs to take action," says
Envision's Dave Pennington. "But it still takes, at the end of the day, a person to take action on that data
-- appropriate action. It still requires that coaches are there to train agents, it still takes people to identify
the trends."

There's a point where more automation is possible technologically, but it isn't practical. Different quality
monitoring software firms make that point in different places. Envision's Pennington again: "We can
automate the recording aspect of it, we can automate the presentation of the data, but in terms of
creating training that addresses the right skill gaps, the ability to recognize sales people versus service
people, the ability for marketing to take action to identify that the customer service center wasn't
educated on the latest campaign that just went out on Tuesday -- that takes people."

"In a contact center where 89 % of your cost is labor, you have to focus on the coaching development of
the people. If you don't develop the people, you will fail," warns etalk's Roger Lee. With regard to
automation, Lee makes an important point: quality monitoring is designed to help make people better
agents. This software is a tool, not an end in itself. The idea behind a lot of quality monitoring
automation is to free the call center's supervisors to do the important stuff, like training and coaching.

The trick is finding the balance between people and technology. Yoel Goldenberg, director of contact
centers and enterprise solutions for NICE Systems (Rutherford, NJ): "I don't believe that technology
today can replace supervisors. I don't see in the near future technology doing evaluations from A to Z.
However, there are certain things that cannot be measured manually." (These include hold times and
complete categorizations of every call.) "The right way to evaluate calls is part of automatic and part of it
manual," he says.

In NICE's case, as in many other vendors, the supervisors make the rules that the software follows -
how to categorize calls, what to listen for, how to evaluate. The software sorts and recommends, and
the supervisors respond accordingly.
The Future
What's next? First, maybe more consolidation among software firms. Verint bought Mercom the same
week we interviewed their quality monitoring experts. There may be more acquisitions to come.

On the subject of the technology itself, Yoel Goldenberg told us that NICE's future includes scenario
analyzers and full call transcription. Roger Lee says etalk will be doing more with e-learning, like training
agents on the fly. Patrick Botz of Voice Print predicts, among other things, more real-time tools.
Envision's Dave Pennington was eager to alert us to the security risk involved in sharing call recordings
with departments outside the call center -- his company is already working to mask private data in calls.
And in general, we can look forward to increased use of quality monitoring outside the call center.

The Future Of Quality Monitoring

by Lesley Vereen, ICMI Consultant

I think that the future of quality monitoring (QM) will be strongly influenced by analytics with increased
focus on both real time and historical information. Things like the ability to convert voice to text, creating
searchable data that can be used not just for improvements within the center, but also for business
intelligence is a reality now, though used by only a few. My hope is that the future includes more use of
the advances in the available technology. Monitoring is not an optional activity in a call center and the
benefits of a QM system are many. Call centers are frequently contacted by customers through multiple
channels, yet few centers monitor all contact channels. I think the future will make it more feasible to
monitor the entire customer experience from beginning to end, regardless of the selected channel and
even identifying how, when and what each customer's preferred channel is.

One of the age old complaints is that agents feel threatened by the monitoring process, though in our
experience they want more frequent feedback to know how they're doing and how to improve. Although
there is absolutely no substitute for face to face coaching conversations, I think we may continue to see
more timely feedback supported with technology that improves instant feedback to agents for self
directed improvement opportunities.

The technology has advanced tremendously since first coming on the market, and while it may appear
to have reached its peak, there will likely continue to be added capabilities and integration with other
technologies. As other new call center technologies come on the scene, I'm sure the QM systems will
continue to evolve as well.

Speech Lessons: Assuring True Self-Service Success via Voice

by: Greg Levin
Topics: Self-Service (IVR and Web)
Description: Speech recognition technology adoption is rapidly increasing in call centers. Organizations
are finding that, when designed correctly, speech brings high caller acceptance of IVR systems -- and
higher return on investment.

Speech recognition—not too long ago considered aclumsy technology unlikely to

win over customers—has become the darling of contact centers and callers alike.
The technology was being used in less than 10 percent of contact centers as
recently as 2000, according to a study that year by customer contact research
firm Ascent Group.However, that figure jumped to 40 percent in last year’s
survey, with another 32 percent of contact centers reporting that they were
planning to deploy speech recognition in the immediate future.

So why the big jump in the numbers in so short a time? Easy—speech recognition
technology has rapidly evolved (see sidebar at bottom of page), is highly effective
and, consequently, is what customers want. In a recent survey conducted by
speech automation leader Nuance Communications, 74 percent of consumers said
that using a speech recognition system is as good as or better than dealing with a
live agent. That’s wonderful news for contact centers, considering the fact that a
typical customer call handled by an agent costs around $1.50, while the same call
handled by a speech recognition port costs under 10 cents.

An even more recent survey,

The Voice Automation Benchmark Survey, by Nuance brings even more good
news to contact centers. Companies are improving customer satisfaction by
approximately 25 percent over their touch-tone systems through their use of
speech recognition, according to the survey. In addition, they are reducing their
“zero-out” rates (callers who press zero to be transferred to a live agent),
abandonment rates and other key metrics for call center performance by
approximately 20 percent or more. And take this data to the boardroom: The
survey indicates that the average return on investment for speech recognition
systems is approximately 150 percent, with the break-even period around 11
months.

Keep in mind, however, that all this is what speech recognition

can be , not what it always is . The technology has tremendous potential—but
only when smart choices and expert design are incorporated. Rapid deployment
of speech recognition can, and usually does, lead to rapid alienation of valued
customers. As Bruce Pollock, a speech recognition consultant with West
Corporation, explains, “There are a lot of moving parts that must come together
simultaneously to achieve harmony and great results. If there’s one element that
is not functioning effectively, and in-sync with the others, it can negatively impact
the entire caller experience.”

Keys to Speech Success

Pollock and many others who specialize in helping contact centers design and
deploy advanced speech recognition applications point to several critical practices
and success factors:
RECOGNIZE THAT SPEECH-ENABLED IVR AND TRADITIONAL TOUCH-TONE
IVR ARE DIFFERENT ANIMALS.

Treat speech like touch-tone, and it -- and your customers -- will come back to
bite you, says Elaine Cascio of research and consulting firm Vanguard
Communications. “Don’t simply recreate your existing touch-tone application in
speech. One of the benefits of ASR (advanced speech recognition) is that it
enables us to flatten menus and reduce the number of steps for callers to get
what they need. Using your current menus but requiring speech rather than
keypad input, or even worse, taking the “press or say” approach, is a sure way to
frustrate callers and increase call length.”

Doug B. Brown, vice president of eLoyalty’s Architecture and Call Center Practice
areas, agrees that contact centers that approach speech-enabled IVR the way
they do traditional systems are missing the point—and numerous opportunities.
“The world in which the traditional IVR platform developed and matured is long
gone—and the difference is as evident as the difference between day and night.
…This is not your father’s IVR—it’s better, easier and cheaper, and the bottom
line is that organizations need to understand what it is and how it is different so
they can best take advantage of this exciting technology.”

PARTNER WITH THE RIGHT PEOPLE.

To ensure that they realize the powerful potential of speech recognition, leading
contact centers take time to seek a reputable and reliable vendor that has made
speech its specialty. “With ASR, you rely on vendors’ expertise in user interface,
dialogue design, accuracy and a host of other areas where most corporate IT or
telecom departments have little or no experience,” explains Cascio. She suggests
looking for partners who not only understand your specific business requirements
and who have successfully implemented applications in similar environments, but
also who are willing to guarantee service levels for recognition.
Fortunately, adds Pollock, it isn’t difficult to find a good speech vendor with a solid
product these days. “The latest speech recognition software from the major
vendors works very well in call centers and other operating environments,” he
says. “The most recent releases have enhancements that can meaningfully
improve the caller experience.”

ENSURE GOOD DIALOGUE DESIGN.

Dialogue design—how the system/caller interaction is scripted—can spell the

difference between a speech recognition application that wins over customers
and one that makes them scream. As Pollock says, “You can have the highest
quality speech software in the world, but if your call center speech application
interface is not intuitive to callers, you’ll have recognition problems—not because
of the speech engine, but because of poor dialogue design.”

He adds that, while the vendor may be the scripting master, it’s up to the contact
center client to play an active role in the process. This will ensure not only that
the center’s managers and IT peopleunderstand the call flows and prompts, but
also that the dialogue design is in line with the center’s corporate culture and
caters to the centers’ specific customers.
INCORPORATE CTI.
As effective as speech recognition can be as a pure self-service tool, often the
caller will want to, or have to, speak to a live agent. And there is nothing more
frustrating for customers than, after telling the IVR system what they want to do
and providing their account number (or other information), having to repeat the
exact same information to the agent who later handles their call.

Centers with CTI-enabled speech recognition eliminate such customer frustration,

and shorten call lengths, by investing in applications that integrate the voice and
the data portions of a call, and then deliver that information to agents’ desktops.

Customers aren’t the only ones who will appreciate the intelligent transfer. CTI
will likely save your agents from burnout. “Most call center speech applications
require [agent] backup for numerous reasons,” says Pollock. “Look for an
opportunity to use CTI to ‘close the integration gap’ so that [agents] can have
access to what your callers speak into the speech system—and don’t have to
repeat the same questions when initiating their portion of the call.”

ENHANCE THE APPLICATION VIA PERSONALIZATION.

This is one of the hottest new trends in speech recognition today. Common
service sense dictates that the more customized an automated application is, the
more eagerly customers will embrace it. That’s why more contact centers are
banking on personalized speech recognition—applications that gather and store
specific data about individual customers and use that information to customize
responses and speed transactions with callers during future interactions. The
most common example is the use of “skip lists, ”where the application—after
recognizing an established customer based on their phone number or other
information -- skips over options that do not apply to that particular customer.
With such an pplication in place, a customer who calls weekly to check his
account balance could be greeted with “Hello Mr. Johnson, would you like to check
your balance again?” Or a customer who requested to speak Spanish on their last
two transactions could be greeted instantly in Spanish the next time they call.

“Through some simple programming and a good text-to-speech engine, callers

will perceive that the application has been personalized for them,” explains Paul
Kowal, president of Kowal Associates, a customer relationship management
consulting firm in Boston. “For a call center interested in deploying a personalized
speech recognition application, the benefits are many and the costs are small
compared to those benefits.”

TEST, TEST, TEST PRIOR TO FULL-SCALE DEPLOYMENT.

Contact centers with the best speech-enabled IVR applications typically run a
series of trials with customer focus groups to uncover any technical glitches and
to determine how customer-centric the system is. Usability tests are critical, says
Vanguard’s Cascio, “to ensure that dialogue design is accurate and that
vocabularies are complete. …Testing also allows you to get feedback on the
‘personality’ of the application to ensure that users find it attractive and that it
matches your corporate image.”
Be selective when choosing whom to include in a customer focus group, suggests
Rex Stringham, president and CEO of Enterprise Integration Group (EIG), an
independent professional services firm specializing in IVR research and
improvement. Trial subjects, he says, should be representative of the population
who will be calling most often, including both neophytes to IVR/speech recognition
and experienced callers. “Pay more heed to the representative sample rather
than to the sheer number of trial subjects.”

Top contact centers also involve agents in the testing phase. Doing so, say
speech recognition experts, not only provides the center with agents’ invaluable
insights with regard to design and usability, it also gets agents familiar with the
ins and outs of the application right from the start, which will later help them
promote it to customers and to answer their questions about the application.

CONTINUOUSLY MONITOR THE SYSTEM, SEEK FEEDBACK, AND MAKE

IMPROVEMENTS.

Having a quality assurance process in place is important for any IVR system to be
effective. Add speech to the mix, and ensuring quality becomes positively
paramount, says Stringham. “Call centers often survive a less-than-optimum
[touchtone] IVR application. Sub-optimum speech recognition, on the other hand,
will result in applications that simply do not work.”

To ensure that speech applications run smoothly and delight customers every
day, leading contact centers continuously monitor the IVR in action, paying close
attention to how callers interact with the system, and vice versa. In addition,
many centers seek customer feedback on the application via email or phone
surveys.

Pollock agrees that monitoring IVR transactions and gathering customer feedback
is valuable, but points out that such practices alone are insufficient. Contact
centers with the best speech recognition applications, he says, also make
frequent test calls themselves to ensure that the system functions properly on all
types of transactions. And, as with pre-pilot testing, he recommends making
improvements based on feedback provided by agents—the people who listen to
customers’ criticism of and praise for the speech application on a daily basis.

With such a holistic quality assurance initiative in place, says Pollock, “The system
will remain functional and fresh—and self-service usage will continue to grow.”

-----------------------------------------------

Speech Recognition Spelled Out

Speech recognition technology enables callers to navigate through an IVR system by simply speaking rather
than by pushing touchtone phone buttons. It has been around for a while, but only recently has it achieved
high marks in terms of completion rates and accuracy, with vocabularies of up to 50,000 words. “Speech
recognition finally works,” say Gartner analysts. “[It’s] an emerging self-serve technology that will enhance
customer service while reducing personnel costs.”
Speech recognition not only works with both touch-tone and rotary phones, advanced speech recognition
(ASR) engines feature natural language processing, which enables customers to speak full phrases or
sentences and answer multiple questions, often speeding the rate of call completion. For example, customers
can cut through unnecessary menu options by stating exactly what they want (i.e., “ I would like to change
my mailing address.”) In addition, advanced speech recognition applications provide an unmatched level of
security: once customers “register” their voice in the IVR, their voice patterns are recognized during future
transactions. (Each person has a unique voice pattern that cannot be duplicated or changed.)