Telerus Offers Jails Free Trial of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Service
AIS™ automates 80% of incoming calls, saving staff hours & ensuring prompt citizen service
DENVER – February 23, 2012 … Telerus announces that for a limited time, AIS™, the nation’s leading voice automation service for jails, is available as a free 60-day trial for U.S. jails of all sizes. The compelling service automates an average of 80 percent of incoming phone calls to free jail staff for other tasks while empowering citizens with quick and easy self-service options. Jails appreciate the budget relief and additional staffing hours available for other tasks, while citizens appreciate the improved information access.
“Most U.S. jails receive mass quantities of citizen phone calls that are repetitive in nature. The volume and repetition create an ideal environment for voice automation,” said Ted Radey, CEO of Telerus, the company behind AIS™. “With AIS™, citizens forego lengthy holds while jail staff members are free for tasks more complex than answering the same questions over and over. Within a few weeks of turn-up, most jails wonder how they operated without AIS™, but we invite all jails to experience AIS™ first hand and then judge for themselves. Before “the Cloud,” this type of offer was unthinkable and we are glad to bring modern voice technology to the sometimes neglected local jail community.”
Citizen phone calls inundate local jails, devouring resources and exacerbating budget-driven understaffing woes. Answering repetitive questions, staff members frequently sound like broken records while struggling to keep up and maintain job accuracy with other critical tasks such as booking and release. Meanwhile, citizens dealing with the stress of arrested loved ones are commonly frustrated by busy signals, extended holds, and no answers.
“Most jail administrators are intrigued by the concept of voice automation in the Cloud and now it can be piloted without any budgetary commitment whatsoever,” added Radey. “In fact, once jail administrators witness the savings, AIS™ usually becomes a budgetary solution. And it’s not only facilities that benefit, but also tax paying citizens deserving of anytime/anyplace access to public information.”
Just a few years ago, the price point and complexity of IVR technology excluded all but the largest U.S. jails. Large state and federal agencies had access to the IVR “Country Club,” but limited budgets and resources made the technology prohibitive for most local jails. Fortunately, advances in Cloud computing and Telerus’ focus on jail specific IVR applications make the service affordable for jails of all sizes and this unprecedented free trial offer possible.
The free 60-day trial of AIS™ can be easily implemented. According to Warden Michael Tolerico of the Passaic County Jail in New Jersey, “I’ve worked with a lot of different vendors on all kinds of new computer systems and AIS™ was hands down the most seamless install and transition we’ve ever had. Going live was absolutely effortless on our part.”
AIS™ has been a critical part of the Passaic County Jail’s operations for more than three years. Jail staff that had once been leery of an automated phone system were immediately won over by its effectiveness.
“The staff would probably go nuts if we turned off AIS.” Tolerico noted. “It’s been absolutely worthwhile for everyone – the staff, the callers and the bottom line.”
For more information on Telerus or AIS™, visit www.telerus.com.
MEDIA CONTACT: Joy Meadows, 303-522-9045, joy@meadowspr.com.
Telerus Featured in Sheriff Magazine
In the latest Sheriff Magazine, Telerus is featured in a byline article about IVR solutions written by Sheriff Brad Rogers of Elkhart County, IN.
Governments cut computing costs in the cloud
With no end in sight to shrinking budgets, state and local governments are shoring up aging tech systems and relying more on delivering crucial public services over the Internet cloud.
The trend is in an early stage.
Computer maker Dell recently helped Gaston County, N.C., consolidate its data storage for a $500,000 savings. Dell also helped the city of St. Petersburg, Fla., realize a $150,000 savings by equipping office workers with virtualized PCs that run on a central server instead of issuing specific desktop machines to each one.
"We're seeing private-sector best practices migrating into the public sector and helping governments realize many of the same savings and efficiencies," says Dell spokesman Scott Radcliffe.
Texas, California and several other states now permit driver's license renewals online. Delivering such cloud services — which means accessing data and software remotely from a computing device via the Internet — can be cheaper for local governments. And it allows citizens to skip long lines.
"The primary driver is money," says IDC analyst Thom Rubel. "Governments are facing flat budgets for at least the next three years, if not longer."
Local officials are taking cues from the federal government. States, counties and cities are paying closer attention to sales pitches for technology that streamlines aging systems and relies more on cloud services.
"Technology allows them to become more productive and effective serving citizens with scarcer resources," says Andrew Bartels, analyst at Forrester Research.
Privacy remains a big concern. Privacy advocates and elected officials worry about data theft — and about insurers, banks and employers using sensitive information to discriminate against applicants.
Still, White House chief information officer Vivek Kundra last February announced an initiative to consolidate hundreds of redundant federal government databases. Kundra also called for stepping up the federal government's reliance on cloud-based systems to deliver public services.
Dell, IBM, Xerox, Intel, Applied Materials and EMC endorsed Kundra's call for a "cloud-first" approach to government procurement.
Forrester estimates that federal spending on information technology will total $71.3 billion this year, up from $68.6 billion in 2010, a 5% bump. And research firm IDC says that the percentage Uncle Sam spends for IT services, as compared to purchases of hardware and software, continues to rise.
Tech suppliers, of course, are hungry for the fresh revenue that could come from increased government spending on cutting-edge tech systems. But with budgets squeezed tight, they must work hard for every sale.
"The longer-term effect is that this will help spur economic activity by creating governments that better facilitate commerce," says Rubel. He says tech-savvy government services "create better public policy outcomes for citizens."
Beat the Downturn
By Haim Argaman from SpeechTechMag.com - Posted Jun 22, 2009
Imagine this. Your company is trying to stay profitable in the midst of an economic downturn. You want to keep up with the competition and cut costs, so you decide to update your speech-enabled interactive voice response (IVR) system. You hire developers to come up with an appropriate interface. Soon you’re ready to go and launch a new speech-enabled IVR. "Hooray/Great/Yes!" you think to yourself. Hold times will go down, customers will be thrilled, and you’ll make it through the tough economy ahead of the competition and with more customers than ever.
Sound like this could be you? The fact is, I’m always chagrined to see companies investing in new IVR systems and not checking on the projected returns. If you’re preparing to take on an IVR project, you’re on the right track, but take my advice—do a return on investment analysis first. Speech-enabled IVR is a great way to cut costs and improve customer service in a downturn, but you need a road map if you’re going to reach your company goals and have clients notice an improvement in your service. Otherwise, somewhere down the road, something invariably will go wrong. This is no surprise, because implementing speech-enabled IVR systems within a call center is never straightforward. Even if the design functions perfectly, you have to make sure you select the project that will deliver the most beneficial results. Without ROI analysis to determine the best project scope to maximize profitability, you’re just driving blind. But over and over again, I see companies losing money and consequently missing their business goals. The new or improved IVR system may work perfectly as designed but still fail to yield the projected returns.
The result? Piles of lost money just when it is needed most. The company suffers, the clients suffer, and a blaming finger is pointed at the speech-enabled system.
Don’t let this happen to you! There doesn’t need to be high risk in implementing a new speech-enabled IVR system, and ROI analysis can let you skip the worry and the unpleasant surprises. so then, skip the worry and the unpleasant surprises. I always say that advanced speech-enabled IVR systems are the future of customer service, but you need to be able to justify the changes.
The trouble is, more often than not, businesses may not realize the complexity of an IVR system overhaul. But think about it. How will the new IVR impact hold rates? Drop rate? Call volume? How long before churn rates improve? How will the change affect your agent staff? It takes complex analysis to forecast the impact of a new IVR system in a call center environment. ROI analysis is an intricate process that makes sure you choose the right approach for your speech-enabled IVR system, addressing your company needs..
As far as I’m concerned, ROI analysis is a crucial stage of IVR system development—especially in an economic downturn. Take my word for it! You don’t have to take any unnecessary risks. You can get through the economic downturn intact with ROI analysis on a carefully planned speech-enabled IVR system.
With ROI analysis, you can now predict the future!
IVR Market Expected to Continue Growing Through 2011
By Leonard Klie from SpeechTechMag.com - Posted Jul 14, 2009
According to research by DMG Consulting, the overall interactive voice rsponse (IVR) market will grow to $2.7 billion by 2011, with renewed interest applied to hosted/managed service vendors with both inbound and outbound applications that have “reinvigorated the IVR sector with innovation, quick deployments, and cost-effective solutions with a high value proposition and rapid [return on investment].”
Among the highly competitive hosted/managed service providers driving the trend are Contact Solutions, Nuance Communications, Prairie Interactive Messaging, Tellme Networks, TuVox, Voxify, and West Interactive, according to DMG’s report.
Overall, the firm projects a four-year compound annual growth rate of 13.4 percent for the hosted/managed-inbound IVR sector and 18.7 percent for the outbound IVR segment.
At the same time, though, sales of premises-based IVR solutions are expected to decline. Organizations of all types—companies large and small, governments, higher education, non-profits, and others—that previously bypassed hosted/managed service IVR offerings are not only considering these offerings, but making commitments, the report states.
“Self-service IVR solutions are important for enterprises in good times, and become critical when budgets are tight because they are highly effective in automating interactions that do not require the cognitive capabilities of live agents,” says Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting. “Many of the hosted/managed service IVR providers have come to market with inbound and outbound offerings that are highly responsive to the economic and technical challenges of their customers, and this is speeding up the pace of adoption.”
The projections that the IVR market will continue to attract a lot of attention and investment dollars come as good news for the entire industry, which has seen years of relative quiet. During the first half of 2008, for example, the North American market for IVR and voice portal systems grew at about 10 percent, according to Research & Markets. And even as economies started to slow, sales of speech applications for IVR and voice portal systems were still being built and deployed in large numbers.
By midyear, though, the economic slowdown started adversely affecting sales, especially in the bellwether financial services and insurance industries. However, the demand for next-generation voice portal systems with advanced speech recognition interfaces, as well as the traditional IVR systems designs with dual tone multifrequency (DTMF) interfaces, continued to be high in 2008. Self-service applications running on these systems continued to drive their purchase and use.
“Management of operational costs to handle inbound customer contacts has been and will continue to be the most significant business driver for the creation of self-service applications as well as the sale of IVR and voice portal systems they run on,” the Research & Markets report concluded. “Proactive customer contact applications are rapidly emerging as the IVR and voice portal system’s next big growth engine. Despite over 25 years of applying technology and process improvements, live customer service agents continue to represent the majority of most contact centers’ costs.”
But while the future is bright for the IVR market, the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) market hasn’t fared as well, and that is not projected to change in the short term as budget constraints apply additional downward pressure on the market.
“For 2009, we anticipate a degree of vendor volatility that will cause many customers to stay on the sidelines for a longer period of time than we would expect if downward pressure was coming only from the weakened economy,” Alan Weckel, director of the Dell’Oro Group, predicted in another report. “In the current environment, some customers will hold on to existing analog and digital lines for a longer period of time.”
Notwithstanding, VoIP penetration will continue to grow, albeit at a slower pace compared to previous years, Weckel anticipates. According to the report, Cisco Systems, Avaya, and Nortel Networks had the most IP line shipments in the quarter, but IP line shipments in general for the eight largest vendors in the market—namely Aastra, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, NEC, Nortel, and Siemens—averaged only 49 percent of total line shipments in the quarter. That leaves plenty of room for other vendors to get their feet in the door.
Speech Analytics Delivers the Insight
By Stephen Lawrence from SpeechTechMag.com - Posted Apr 2, 2009
Society’s expectations for more personalized products and services have risen. As a result, vendors need to better understand their customers and prospects to remain competitive in the marketplace. One of the best ways for a company to do this is to spend time examining the interactions between its employees and customers. Speech analytics delivers the insights organizations require to do just that. Analytics provides opportunities to improve the customer experience, enforce compliance and protocol as required by law, and mitigate risk.
The marketplace for speech analytics is a nascent environment, and not all organizations are aware that the technology exists. With the arrival of 2009, a big question remains in the minds of speech analytics vendors: Is this the year that speech analytics adoption will cross the chasm from early adopters to the early majority?
According to an Aberdeen survey conducted in November and December, 31 percent of best-in-class organizations have implemented speech analytics and 24 percent plan to do so. This compares to only 16 percent of all other companies that have already implemented analytics and 26 percent that plan to do so. What is evident is the low adoption level and continued growth in the near future.
For speech analytics adoption to continue, it is important to understand why organizations implement it. Aberdeen probed survey respondents to find out what drives them to introduce speech analytics into their contact centers.
An overwhelming percentage (66 percent) of companies indicated that they implemented speech analytics to improve the customer experience. That said, organizations also indicated that improving customer retention (24 percent), reducing costs (24 percent), and improving compliance monitoring efficiency (22 percent) are other important reasons for using speech analytics.
With the increase in video usage by both consumers (think YouTube) and enterprises (think of that demo video you watched on speech analytics), it is evident that a lot of speech is locked in video. Yet it is difficult to find this information. It is often found using keywords, phrases, and metadata (e.g., title, subject, or person) that identify the video. Speech analytics can provide much-needed access to the information locked within the video itself. This can result in companies saving time and money that is spent creating, for example, the right metadata.
The benefits reaped by contact center agents can also be realized by users outside the contact center. For example, litigators now have the ability to search hundreds, if not thousands, of documents that in the past would have taken many man-hours to do. Companies in financial services can now closely monitor their businesses across a much larger sample of conversations for regulatory compliance.
Departments such as marketing, public relations, sales, and engineering, as well as industries such as financial services, insurance, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals, can also benefit from implementing speech analytics. Furthermore, speech analytics should not be considered just a stand-alone application. It is also highly useful as a module that can bring value to users of customer relationship management, e-learning, or business intelligence applications.
Although the adoption level of speech analytics in the contact center is low, there is promise for growth. Moreover, while the initial growth and acceptance of speech analytics is in contact centers, speech analytics is already being adopted in other areas of companies, as well as in a variety of industries
The Tipping Point of Speech Proliferation
By Nancy Jamison from SpeechTechMag.com - Posted Aug 27, 2009
Remember the Analog Display Terminal Interface (ADTI) phone that promised to let you surf the Web from your kitchen? How about virtual assistants, such as Wildfire, Hey Anita!, Webley, and General Magic? In the late 1990s, Web-enabled display phones and virtual assistants were a virtual market that didn’t go anywhere. However, what is old is new again, and now phones of all types let you search the Web, either visually, by voice, or in combination, and any communication device has the power to act as a personal assistant using speech as a voice user interface (VUI).
What happened to facilitate this change? Much as we hoped back then, those applications were ahead of their time. To do a refresh on how we got here, I chatted with Michael Thompson, senior vice president and general manager of Nuance Mobile, about the changes that have occurred since the mid-1990s and the developments that have caused the tipping point for mass adoption of speech as a user interface. While focused on Nuance, this history is made up of many speech technology vendors.
To set the table, in the 1990s we had traditional telephone interfaces with minimal computing power and an infant Web. Contact centers were half a decade into providing interactive voice response (IVR) for self-service and had just begun to add VUIs as an option. For speech, it took an entire server to run a speech interface that consisted of very canned, directed dialogue with a caller that took forever to accomplish anything.
What really pushed the growth and sophistication of speech applications was an acceleration in computing power and the development of the Internet. Standards emerged, servers became much more powerful, and mobile devices started to proliferate. Simultaneously, speech technologies became more sophisticated, and we shrunk the footprint required to run them, enabling less expensive deployments and a mix of server and chip-based speech solutions, depending on the application.
As Thompson pointed out, what really carried Nuance and others through the middle years between concept and proliferation was the contact center. As vendors pushed to speech-enable IVR and off-load agents by providing self-service options to customers, speech technology vendors, such as Nuance, advanced their core technologies. This included improvements in speed and accuracy, better grammars, more languages, and more natural sounding text-to-speech. Nuance also advanced natural language capabilities to make VUIs acceptable and useful for customers, opening the door for truly effective voice search of databases and the Web. In addition, Nuance grew the embedded side of its business—first in automobiles and then on handsets—and then continued to enhance dictation.
Speech Is Required
However, the real tipping point for speech came when the visual screen appeared on handsets, thereby unleashing an endless amount that could be provided to the end user, including multimodal applications. This coincided with the advent of unified communications (UC), which uses mobile applications as one of the core sets of solutions for end users. For mobility solutions to be truly effective, speech technologies are required.
Now we have reached a point of convergence in the advancement of these different technologies—including greater computing power and scalability, improved natural language, and the unification of consumer and business applications—so that speech technologies are proliferating everywhere. Even on low-end cell phones, people can search the Web, command and control applications, dial by voice, search for businesses, buy and play music, order goods and services, update corporate databases, get driving directions, and so much more. Today’s mobile phones are sophisticated devices, fully connected to the network and multifaceted for both business and pleasure.
Besides UC-based mobility applications, contact centers, enterprise desktop applications, entertainment software, and automotive applications are just a few areas now incorporating speech technologies.
My next column will focus on some of the new and revolutionary ways speech is being used in these areas. For example, I’ll discuss the growing use of speech-to-text, voice search, predictive text, and rich multimodal applications. Stay tuned.
Demystifying PaaS: The Value Proposition
Demystifying PaaS: The Value Proposition
If your goal is to deliver best-in-class services to consumers from your contact centers, then it’s likely you’ve deployed interactive voice response (IVR) technology to help callers navigate sales, billing, or other questions. You’ve probably written the applications that enable these services, and also own and operate the infrastructure that runs them.
Assuming you were one of the earlier companies to deploy an IVR, your system is probably reaching its end of life. New beginnings always create opportunities to gain strategic advantages. In this case, you can now consider off-loading the on-premises infrastructure and heavy lifting that comes with maintaining it to a VoiceXML platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider. You’ll free up many of the dollars you spend now on IT hardware, data center systems management, capacity planning, and technical labor related to initiating, processing, and terminating these calls. That’s money in hand to redirect to building next-generation VoiceXML applications. Moving away from outdated IVR applications built on proprietary technology to ones that conform to the World Wide Web Consortium’s VoiceXML standard opens the door to reducing integration costs for intelligent call routing and to harnessing the power of natural language speech, both of which matter for providing best-in-class customer experiences.
PaaS also is an equal-opportunity play for companies across sectors, even the financial and health services industries that have operated their IVR environments on premises because of concerns about customer data security. Those concerns can be addressed by choosing a provider that is certified for PCI and SAS70.
You could, of course, try to ride an aging internal IVR system for as long as you can. But that means taking the chance that customers won’t be put off by outdated systems, inefficiencies in proactive responses, agent call routing, and busy tones during call spikes. That last issue can be potentially deadly: Imagine, for example, you’re a cable company and you lack the capacity to seamlessly support incoming call requests for the year’s biggest pay-per-view event. The damage to your revenue could be massive. Even if customers don’t abandon you for a competitor, they might complain about your poor performance on their social networks or take it out on your customer service agents—who might have to mollify them at your expense—when they get through. At the same time, retaining the status quo only grows costs because incoming calls require strong support from live agents.
Do Less So You Can Do More
In the PaaS world, a company’s data center infrastructure and networking responsibility is limited to maintaining its Web and application server and connectivity to its provider. That’s it. Instead of bearing millions of dollars in capital costs to establish or upgrade an in-house platform that has the capacity to handle peaks in call volume, a company can subscribe to a usage-based model that provides the key telecom, hardware, and software components of the call processing infrastructure, while maintaining complete control over the applications.
Being able to access capacity as needed and back up sites as required from a PaaS provider can save companies 70 percent of fixed infrastructure costs. Such expenses are never easily sustainable, but they’re even more of a burden during strained economic times. The recession is making it increasingly clear to more companies that they need to spend their scarce funds on doing more with their expertise and less on the mechanics of sustaining and managing resources.
Just by taking away the server farm infrastructure that used to run your IVR systems, for example, you open the door to cutting energy costs around powering and cooling these platforms. And your IVR infrastructure doesn’t define your company; focus instead on the application and user experience. Computing power, after all, is purely a commodity. So why spend money on labor to manage a commodity?
And make no mistake: You can incur fixed infrastructure expenses and still not necessarily be spared from the black hole of an outage. When a system is installed on premises, an outage that affects that location and possibly its close-to-home backup site can affect your ability to continue to let customers reach out to you. When you use a solution from a hosting provider, you can get complete redundancy via multiple, geographically dispersed data centers. You also get the freedom of not having to continually monitor IVR uptime in your own network operations center and stay on top of the alarms that could arise. When you move to the cloud, your platform is automatically monitored 24/7 by your provider from a state-of-the-art network operations center.
Stay in Control Where It Counts
When it comes to your industry, no one knows your customers’ requirements and expectations better than you do, which is why you need to leverage that knowledge to create a top-tier customer-supporting voice application and user experience. When you turn to a PaaS provider, you can better focus on your business and stay in control of the customer experience. With less infrastructure to manage, and less IT personnel resources required to manage it, you can pay more attention to honing your application developers’ skill sets—both in creating the VoiceXML end-user software and analyzing its performance. When you can focus on analytics, you unlock possibilities for fine-tuning IVR applications to further improve service and even lower call center operating costs.
The latter is as important as the former for increasing the return on investment from IVR applications. Satisfying customers while reducing the cost of servicing them can go hand in hand as long as companies are able to invest in continually improving these applications. Developers who dig through data about calls can learn, for example, that a significant percentage of customers might be trying to use self-service voice options to resolve a specific problem, but the current implementation requires driving them to an agent for a satisfactory conclusion. Knowing this, they could go back and fine-tune the IVR to speed up a caller’s ability to handle a situation by himself, and at the same time automate the function to bring down call center expenses. The more you can drive down the need for users to interact with live agents, the more you can drive down costs, given that processing a call through an IVR costs just a few pennies compared to the hourly cost of each call center agent.
Companies should expect developer support and platform monitoring to be core components of whichever PaaS provider they use. For example, having access to Tier 3 VoiceXML engineers and preproduction staging environments, visibility into platform performance, and tools for IVR developers are all important to success. Providers that offer fully managed outsourcing services, including application design and coding in addition to PaaS capabilities, are more likely to have already developed a strong set of real-time monitoring dashboards and call trace tools. So PaaS customers can benefit from those solutions at no additional cost, speeding their time to deployment and lowering the risk of problems occurring in production applications.
Speaking of speed, when you use a PaaS provider your applications can go live without the hassles of maintaining a separate IVR platform for testing and staging new or upgraded software, and without the struggle of trying to squeeze your particular project onto that environment’s testing schedule.
Further support for VoiceXML platforms also might be available if a provider has a professional services division through which PaaS customers can access other skill sets they require. That might include dialogue design, grammar development, voice recording, and talent services.
When technical staffers are able to focus on meeting business requirements and creating the applications that deliver business value, they’re more productive for the business. It’s important to have a solid infrastructure on which IVR systems run, but it’s not critical to run this infrastructure yourself. It makes a lot more sense to let experts in data center, capacity planning, and telecom management handle those services for you.
Redirecting IT organizations to be more strategic has long been discussed. Offloading the necessary but mundane maintenance work for IVR platforms to a trusted third-party provider is one way to turn that talk into action.
Nuance Study Finds Customers in Favor of Automated Telephone Services
By ROCKY from Phone Marketing Insider - Posted Jan 14, 2010
From a business’s financial and marketing perspective, the advantages of automated telephone services are clear. IVR and cloud telephony capabilities enable businesses to reduce costs while providing more features and services. Yet, no matter how high the efficiency projections for automated telephone services soar, the bottom line needs to result in customers on the other end of the phone call reporting the best customer service experience.
Do customer’s prefer automated telephone services? The survey says… an overwhelming “yes!”
Nuance’s research into the customer’s reaction and perception of automated telephone services tackles this precise issue. They commissioned a study, conducted by Forrester Research, titled “Driving Consumer Engagement with Automated Telephone Customer Service.” The study found that in straightforward phone interactions, including prescription refills, flight status, checking account balances, store information requests and tracking shipments, customers rated a higher preference for automated services over live agents. In the past year, while 82% of Americans experienced speech recognition software or automated touchtones, only a slightly higher figure of 93% of Americans engaged with live agents.
Customer surveys in five industries showed that customers enjoy proactive automated phone notifications in areas such as appointment reminders and travel updates. Customer interest in these notifications ranged from 80% to 93% in the chosen industries.
Why do customer’s prefer automated services?
A key finding in the survey indicated the following statistics:
The 24-hour 7 days a week availability of automated telephone customer service is a key attribute in consumers’ minds. Seventy-seven percent of consumers pointed to 24-hour, seven days a week availability as a reason they value automated telephone customer service systems. Another 40% valued that they didn’t have to wait on hold for a live agent, while 31% cited the ability to obtain information quickly.
While the survey results came out strongly in favor of automated telephone services, customers did distinguish between their interactions with different systems. For example, 67% of customers noted the importance of an “opt out” function to speak with a live agent, and 75% noted this option as the number one way to improve an automated telephone service. Similarly, customers noticed the importance of a system’s logical call flow as “an essential component,” and 45% noted this feature as the top way to improve customer satisfaction. Speech recognition quality also plays a significant role in the customer’s mind, as 42% of customers wanted the speech recognition to understand them on the first try, and 63% chose this factor as the most important way to improve the customer service experience.
How should marketers and businesses use this study?
According to Nuance,
As the research shows, there is a lot of room to improve customer service. Today’s enterprises have the opportunity to differentiate themselves by considering their customers’ needs and providing intuitive speech applications that improve customer loyalty at every touch point.
Now that this study indicates the acceptability, and in fact preference, of customers for automated telephone calls in certain situations, marketers and businesses must evaluate which of their activities they can automate, and how they can most effectively do so. Choosing the right cloud telephony provider is a good first step.
