Speech recognition poised for contact centers

14.03.2005
Von Ee Sze

Up to 20 percent of contact centres in the Asia Pacific are expected to deploy speech recognition by the end of this year as the cost of developing the technology falls.

Presenting the results of a survey on self service in the contact centre industry, James Brooks, senior vice president, APAC Field Operations, Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, said voice was still king in the contact centre with the phone, as well as the Internet, being the preferred modes of interaction.

The survey, which covered 190 contact centre managers and customer service executives in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, also revealed that 59 percent of contact centre managers see self service as essential in meeting customer expectations. Speech recognition comes into the picture by supporting navigation at the front end to connect a caller to the right person. It will replace existing touchtone menus, said Brooks, citing a 40 percent improvement in the time that it takes to go through an interactive voice response (IVR) system using speech compared with a touchtone menu.

There are also opportunities for the use of speech recognition in call completion, for example, for phone banking or the booking of taxis or airline tickets, said Brooks.

The Genesys survey found that only 10 percent of respondents had deployed speech recognition for their customers in the Asia Pacific. Cost was one of the main inhibitors. "In a lot of cases, the business case did not stack up," he said.

However, this may soon change, with the cost of implementing speech-enabled IVRs 30 percent to 40 percent lower than what it was three years ago, pushed down by competition and standardisation on vXML, which voice-enables information on the web.

Brooks estimated that vXML has led to a 50 percent reduction in the cost of developing speech-enabled applications. He expects 20 percent of contact -centres in the Asia Pacific and 50 percent in North America to deploy speech by the end of this year. The deployment will take place in stages, he said, with speech recognition as one of the channels for self service.

The key is to provide customers with access to the contact centre using whatever channel they like, whatever the time. The younger generation, for example, may prefer using the web. But even then, the survey found that 85 percent requested for the call back function.

"Enterprises want people to serve themselves, but when customers want help, they should be able to call you," said Brooks. "People want to be connected to the right person the first time, and organisations have to be accessible."

Unfortunately, he observed, many organisations are still steering customers to channels that they like to manage. In the case of SMS, for example, 81 percent of customers say it is a preferred channel, but less than 2 percent of non-telco organisations support it, said Brooks.

As is the case with speech recognition, one of the main reasons that organisations give for this anomaly is cost. Brooks suggests that this is where organisations can take advantage of the labour arbitrage in offshoring, and treat SMS and web chat as part of "real time" back office functions while driving the customers to voice calls with expert agents within the enterprise to close deal.

"Organisations have to find a way to handle SMS," he said. "The next generation will be using email, instant messaging, web chat, SMS. If you look at the demographics, you need to build relationships and you have to interact on their channels."