white paper ::
Voice Automation Top 10
Key Considerations For Deploying Voice
customer care solutions
Introduction
Voice automation can improve the way your enterprise communicates, accesses information, provides services, establishes security, and conducts transactions. For businesses that must provide information and services to increasingly mobile customers, employees, and partners, voice automation can be an ideal solution. From any phone calls can easily access a range of Web, customer care, and other back-office systems. Voice can actually be used for any application that doesn’t absolutely require human interaction. If there is a way to automate the decision-making process involved in an interaction, then voice is a possible solution. In the face of this broad opportunity within any enterprise, the following ten questions will help narrow your focus to ensure that your voice automation solution — a combination of technologies and services — is deployed in a fast and cost-effective manner.
1. What applications typically provide the greatest business benefits? 2. How should the success of voice solutions be measured? 3. What are the development alternatives: in-house vs. outsourced? 4. What are the deployment alternatives, on-premise or hosted? 5. What are the important standards?
6. How important is the recognition engine decision? 7. What tools exist and how should they be evaluated? 8. What role do piloting, testing, and tuning play?
9. How should the voice automation system be launched to ensure success? 10. After the initial system deployment, what comes next?
1. What applications typically provide the greatest
business benefits?
There are many types of voice deployments. These include high volume transactions, calls with low value creation, off-hour self-service, 24x7 operation, call volume spikes, remote access, caller verification, and when information cannot be easily entered by touchpad. To assess the opportunities in your company, it is helpful to segregate the prospective solutions into five primary application areas: customer care, information,
communications, transactions, and productivity.
Customer care, the broadest category, is targeted at improving customer satisfaction by providing superior service. Increasing call center automation and transaction completion rates ultimately improves operational efficiencies and reduces operating costs. Call steering, which allows quick and easy navigation to contact destinations within a company, is a common customer care application. Customer care applications can also address security issues. For example, a PIN reset application might use voice authentication to verify the identity of a customer, thereby allowing him to change his password in a secure manner—again, without requiring agent interaction.
Information applications are aimed at eliminating agents’ routine tasks and providing customers with greater access. While some companies have deployed Dual Tone Multi- Frequency (DTMF) systems for these tasks, these systems can be difficult to navigate. Plus, many routine tasks require alphanumeric requests, which DTMF simply cannot handle. Store locator services and flight information lines are just two examples of information applications. Communications applications are all about
making access to individuals—or groups— easier. Voice activated dialing (VAD), whereby customers maintain a personal address book and are able to simply speak the name of the person they wish to contact into the phone—rather than looking up and dialing a phone number—is a type of communications application. For example, callers can say “call Chris at home” or “call Brian at the office” to dial a phone number. Auto attendants are among the most common voice applications. Companies around the world enable callers to simply speak the name of the person or functional area with which they wish to connect. What’s more, with voice-driven unified messaging, callers can easily access email, send faxes, and check voicemail with a phone.
Transaction applications are intended to help individuals and companies conduct business in a secure and personalized environment. Often, but not always, there will be some type of financial transaction, like bill payment and ticket purchases. Reservations or flight check-in are also examples of transaction applications. Productivity applications streamline the efficiency of internal business processes, thereby reducing the cost of operations. They enable employees to get their work done more quickly and efficiently so that they ultimately service customers better. Field service automation is an example of a productivity application.
Customer care, the broadest category, is targeted at improving customer satisfaction by providing superior service.
2. How should the success of voice solutions be
measured?
As you contemplate voice strategies, it is essential to quantify the benefits of each target application by estimating its business case. To compare returns and help you prioritize implementation, you should begin to assemble benchmark data points such as agent call volumes, average call durations, number of agent hours, and percentage of calls that are routine.
Automation rates, or transaction completion rates (TCR), increase substantially with voice automation. According to Giga, a leading industry analyst firm, the use of voice increases customer use of interactive voice response (IVR) systems from 20% to 60% over touchtone alone. Voice automation can dramatically reduce the cost for handling calls and deliver a return on your investment in just a few months. According to some estimates, the average cost per call handled by agents ranges anywhere from just over $2.00 to more than $15.00. With voice automation, that cost can typically be cut to 20 cents or less per call.
Of course, ROI models for voice systems—or any technology purchase—need to be customized for each investment since the savings will vary by site, even within organizations. As a rule of thumb, almost any enterprise that uses live agents to handle repetitive tasks will realize a six to twelve month payback from a
voice investment. Hard dollar benefits, which come from productivity enhancements, cost reduction, cost avoidance, and revenue generation, are quantifiable and easily
benchmarked. Of course, most organizations have explicit ROI guidelines incorporating different measures and financial approval thresholds. It is important to obtain and use these guidelines, as they explain what it takes to get approval for a project and will save a great deal of time and effort.
Post implementation, there are advanced system management capabilities available that offer customizable data extraction and report generation, including the ability to track and analyze business metrics. For example, Nuance’s Recognizer™ enables the tagging of discrete sub-sections of an application in the design and development phase to facilitate real-time tracking of a speech application’s ROI based on previously established targets.
Voice automation can dramatically reduce the cost for handling calls and deliver a return on your investment in just a few months.
3. What are the development alternatives: in-house
vs. outsourced?
Technology development strategy is unique to each enterprise. The shared goal is to get through the
application design, development, testing, and deployment process most efficiently, while focusing on the needs of the end user. The alternatives range from complete outsourcing to developing almost entirely in house. Building a voice application, like any new system development project, should be approached in a well planned and consistent manner, with a thorough understanding of both the strategic and tactical components. It is also necessary to undertake these projects with a team of professionals who have speech-specific skills. Voice user interface (VUI) design, for instance, is dramatically different from graphical user interface (GUI) design and requires a completely different skill set. In addition to speech-specific experience, you should look for knowledge of your industry and application area in the team members you select for any project.
Because of the unique challenges presented by speech, you may want to consider an alliance with a voice “expert.” This relationship can help you assess and build internal competencies, develop the best business case, and provide early, iterative, and user-centered design. Plus, they can provide post-implementation training and promotion assistance, which ensure the ongoing
success of a deployment.
Again, when selecting a potential development partner, look for speech-specific skills and industry knowledge. You may choose a partner from a wide variety of companies, including major system integrators, interactive voice response platform providers, independent consultants, application service providers, and value-added resellers. Alternatively, you could choose to work directly with a voice automation solutions company like Nuance— exclusively or in cooperation with one or more other partner companies.
The shared goal is to get through the application design, development, testing, and deployment process most efficiently, while focusing on the needs of the end user.
4. What are the deployment alternatives, on-premise
or hosted?
Enterprises face multiple deployment options, including application service provider (ASP) voice solutions. The bottom line is that, for maximum flexibility, it is very important that a hosted voice platform can ultimately be deployed on the customer’s premise. That ensures 100% application portability and easy migration. An ASP voice deployment can reduce initial investment and is an effective mechanism for handling
unpredictable call volumes. Administration and maintenance are conveniently outsourced. This approach also allows your company to “experiment” with voice, deploying customer premise equipment (CPE) solutions after proving them in an ASP environment. Over the life of the solution, costs of a hosted model tend to be greater than on-premise solutions. Security concerns should also be considered over sensitive data and intellectual property managed in a third-party environment.
A third option is a co-location situation where the enterprise owns all software and the ASP manages, maintains, and operates the voice automation system. In a distributed scenario, the ASP owns and operates only the speech-related software and the enterprise owns and operates the application runtime environment. Fully hosted generally means the ASP owns and operates all aspects of the system.
5. What are the important standards?
Unlike proprietary speech solutions, open, standards-based voice automation enables businesses to: 1) reduce their call center costs by leveraging investments in existing Internet and IT infrastructure; 2) provide integration flexibility for a best-of-breed implementation; and 3) operate on inexpensive, off-the-shelf hardware and computing resources.
VoiceXML 2.0 is the W3C approved standard for speech application development. Based on a Web
architecture, it allows existing expertise and investment in Internet infrastructure—such as application servers, business logic and rules, and customer and corporate databases
to be leveraged. Moreover, the VoiceXML standard enables an application built on one platform to be moved to another platform more easily and cost effectively. Since integrations to back-end systems are all performed through standard J2EE application servers the effort can also be reused when moving platforms. Most businesses have already deployed J2EE-based application servers and are handling millions of mission-critical transactions every day. Voice solutions benefit from the application servers’ clustering, load balancing, and automatic fail-over architectures to ensure high system uptime.
Support for Voice Over IP (VoIP) standards is also important to ensure the platform can address the future evolution of company networks. As voice and data networks converge, VoIP enables companies to benefit from simplified management of the converged network and realize cost savings.
VoiceXML 2.0 is the W3C approved standard for speech applicaiton development.
6. How important is the recognition engine decision?
The recognition engine is the foundation on which voice applications rely when executing commands and business rules. The engine (e.g., recognition, text-to-speech, authentication), drives the application performance and provides the system management and administration capabilities for optimal results. There are two key criteria to assess when choosing a recognition engine. First, is it accurate? If it isn’t, your ability to achieve the maximum automation rates, customer satisfaction improvements, and ROI is diminished. To see the impact accuracy can have on costs, consider this example. If a contact center started with 1,000
agents each earning $60,000/year, a recognition engine that was only 82% accurate would still need 180 agents to handle the same volume of calls. Whereas, a recognition engine with 94% accuracy would require only 60 agents. In this example, the more accurate engine would save over $7 million/year compared to using the less accurate engine. As a reference, the Nuance Recognizer engine is rated over 94% accurate. The second aspect to assess is whether the recognition engine has been proven in environments like your own? As with most technologies, there is a vast difference between a technology running in a laboratory or in small pilots and with high volume production environments. The best measure of this is often to discuss your needs with several other organizations that have deployed the technology and benefit from their experience. To further ensure your decision, it is important also to review the diversity of languages that are supported by the recognition engine in order to adequately respond to your current and emerging caller populations.
The recognition engine is the foundation on which voice applications rely when executing commands and business rules.
$60 Million $10.8 Million With 82% Speech Recognition Accuracy Rate $3.6 Million With Nuance’s 94% Speech Recognition
Accuracy Rate
$7 Million
Savings Over Less Accurate Speech Recognition Engine!
7. What tools exist and how should they
be evaluated?
Building and maintaining a voice automation application requires a robust toolset optimized for the task. This is true regardless of whether you choose a packaged application that requires light configuration, a completely custom application, or anything in between.
When choosing a tool or an application development environment, there are a number of considerations. You should look for ease of use; a deep assortment of best practices, pre-built grammars, and code libraries that reduce the time, effort, and expertise required across the speech application lifecycle; and features that facilitate call flow design, software development, usability testing, and application tuning.
Building and maintaining a voice automation application requires a robust toolset optimized for the task.
8. What role do piloting, testing, and tuning play?
In order to optimize the performance of the system before a full deployment, the voice application should be made available as a pilot to a limited audience of users. A good pilot is an iterative process. That means running the system, checking the data, and then tuning the system so it fills all your needs before—and after—full deployment.
Once your voice system is live, you must continue to monitor its performance through ongoing data collection. This means routinely checking grammar coverage and recognition accuracy, and if needed, tuning the recognition parameters to improve performance. The same iterative process used during the pilots can be used to identify additional optimizations based on data collected from the full caller population. This data can also serve to track changes in usage due to increased caller familiarity or changes in the caller population.
Tuning is critical to ensure that the system functions effectively and remains relevant to the user group as the service rolls out geographically and as users become more experienced. It is only through capturing, transcribing, and analyzing live caller utterances that the application achieves optimal performance. To perform system tuning, both in-depth analysis and simulation capabilities are required. For example, Nuance Recognizer™ bundles several tools to optimize your system over the entire application lifecycle.
Regardless of whether they are performed during pilots or post deployment, most tuning efforts focus on three principal areas: grammar, recognition, and dialog. In grammar tuning, analysis and corrective actions increase the grammar coverage while removing unnecessary words, thereby resulting in overall improved system response and accuracy. Recognition tuning focuses on conducting experiments to determine the optimal search, confidence, and acoustic parameters of the software to maximize system accuracy and speed. Dialog tuning ensures that the prompts correspond appropriately to the grammars and that the dialog flow meets user expectations. User experience and live caller research can also contribute valuable feedback from real users during the tuning process.
It is only through capturing, transcribing, and analyzing live caller utterances that the application achieves optimal performance.
9. How should the voice automation system be
launched to ensure success?
Voice automation ROI is closely linked to user adoption. Because voice automation is interactive and customer-facing—unlike other call center technologies—you can’t simply throw the switch and walk away, or just do agent training. It’s important to build consumers’ awareness of the system, properly set expectations, and promote usage. The effort and cost to educate end customers will be paid back many times over the life of the application through fraud reduction, more effective use of agents’ time, and reduced call durations.
The launch planning and production process typically takes two to three months. Because some marketing deliverables have long production lead times, it is important to start your launch planning process early and in parallel with the design and development of the application. Plus, many of the decisions, such as those regarding brand and persona, that are made in the early phases of implementation will have a direct influence over many aspects in the launch phase.
Tactically, different communications vehicles offer specific advantages and limitations, and selecting the right mix is crucial. For example, some companies choose to prepare pocket guides and wallet cards for their users. Others use billing inserts and advertising. Public relations can be key, especially if there’s a compelling persona or branding effort attached to the system.
10. After the initial system deployment, what
comes next?
Once your first voice system is in use, you will need to continue monitoring its performance through ongoing data collection and tuning the recognition parameters to optimize its performance. You may even create new recognition models based on the increased data to achieve
additional efficiency breakthroughs.
Inevitably, you’ll evolve to changing business requirements and likely extend voice automation successes to other applications in the enterprise. Just think about all the different ways your customers and workforce require around the clock availability, better response times, and greater consistency—no matter where they are. You might want to liken voice automation to the Web. Initial websites were built as brochure-ware, with the ability to present product information online. Over time, they have evolved to include intranets and extranets aimed at improving access and productivity for employees, partners, and a whole host of other constituencies. Voice automation systems are going through a similar evolution, starting out in the area of customer care—
automating tasks for contact center agents—and morphing rapidly into solutions that address the needs of an increasingly mobile workforce, consumers, and the community. Voice is a fundamental enabling technology
Once your first voice system is in use, you’ll need to continue
monitoring its performance through ongoing data collection and tuning the recognition parameters to optimize its performance.
About Nuance Communications, Inc.
Nuance
Customer Interaction over the Voice Channel
Nuance is a truly global organization with worldwide capabilities and dedication to make our customers succeed. The company has more than 35 regional offices, with a significant international presence in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Japan and the United Kingdom. With a large dedicated sales presence in more than 70 companies, the company brings a global perspective that can deliver solutions to numerous local markets. We are committed to pioneering new technologies and solutions to improve customer care.
• Nuance automates 8 billion call interactions a year, in more than 3,000 customer care installations • Nuance has more than 800 speech scientists and engineers
• Nuance offers a professional services organization of more than 1000 solutions experts • Nuance has an IP portfolio that includes more than 1000 patents and patents pending • Nuance customer interaction solutions support more than 54 languages and dialects • Nuance has 90% market share in automated directory assistance
• Nuance speech recognition and Nuance text-to-speech solutions are on 250 million+ devices • Nuance maintains one of the world’s largest libraries of speech data
Nuance is in the business of helping companies better support, communicate with and understand their customers while maintaining operational efficiency goals. Nuance currently supports over 8 billion care interactions around the world. No other company has as much experience as Nuance in understanding how customers interface with a care operation. Our vision is to make every customer interaction a winning experience. For more information about our customer interaction solutions, business consulting and professional services, please visit www.nuance.com/care. For more information email [email protected] or call 781-565-5000.
