Some Industry Visionaries Share Their Visions Of Speech Technologies

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Oct 2004

Aspect Communications Corp. (www.aspect.com)

"Applications like speech recognition, text-to-speech and voice authentication have enabled contact centers to replace touch-tone interfaces with natural language prompts that simplify the experience for callers and handle more complex transactions than traditional IVR."

West Corporation (www.west.com)

"The goal of most contact centers is to provide either customer care or customer acquisition. West believes customer acceptance of speech technology has sufficiently evolved to make speech one of the most important tools available for customer interaction. While many companies are evaluating speech solutions as replacements for live agents, West believes that companies are better served by examining a blended solution that incorporates automated speech technology with live agents to maximize effectiveness."

"The benefit of a good speech program in a contact center is that it provides a low-cost ability to automate [recurring processes] currently being performed by live agents. Companies can use automated speech programs to handle most data entry processes, like recording a caller's name and address. Live agent time can then be re-focused to handle more complex sales or problem solving, thereby boosting individual agent productivity while reducing an organization's costs,"

Edify (www.edify.com)

"With the advent of standards like VoiceXML and SALT and support from major vendors, more and more companies are looking to speech to revolutionize the way they interact with their customers."

Edify - Ken Waln, Chief Technology Officer

"Speech automation is a business imperative. The technology is proven and more robust than ever, and the benefits that can be gained from an operational and customer satisfaction perspective are extraordinary and cannot be overlooked."

Aculab (www.acufab.com)

"Speech technology has great potential and in the call center has already been put to creative use whether as a cost saver or a means to generate additional revenue. There is yet more room for creativity, which will increasingly see speech technologies as an intrinsic part of future communications - further aiding the productivity of agents and adding value to the consumer; seeking a speedy route to gain/provide information or complete a variety of transactions or tasks."

SER Solutions, Inc. (www.ser.com)

"For many businesses, the primary interface between the company and its customers is the contact center. One negative customer experience can forever jeopardize the relationship between the customer and company. According to research from Cutting Edge Information, a business intelligence firm, 65 percent of customers switch companies because of poor contact center customer service. While many contact centers use call recording to support their quality assurance initiatives, it is still impossible to review 100 percent of the calls for quality assurance. Until recently, the challenges faced by contact centers to increase call handling quality and customer satisfaction while maintaining the costs associated with manually monitoring agent activities was virtually impossible. However, SER Solutions believes speech technology holds a set of new "killer apps." One such killer application is a quality assurance application that enables contact centers to go beyond call recording and simple call mining technologies to analyze and score 100 percent of all recorded calls for script adherence, achievement of key performance indicators (KPIs) and overall call quality."

Genesys (www.genesyslabs.com)

"The implementation of speech technologies in contact centers allows companies to reach more customers; offer consistent, high quality customer care and reduce the cost of customer service. These applications tie Internet technologies with voice self-service, allowing customers to conduct business over the phone in a new and intuitive way."

Empirix (www.empirix.com)

"Speech technology has the potential to save organizations a lot of money, while enabling them to provide better, faster service to customers - but only if the technology performs well. When customers run across speech applications that don't work well, their inclination will be to zero out to an agent - and they probably won't try the speech application again."

Avaya (www.avaya.com)

"In today's fast-paced world, speech applications for contact centers are critical to help enterprises gain a competitive edge through enhanced customer service and improved organizational productivity."

Microsoft (www.microsoft.com)'

"Microsoft's vision is that speech will become a mainstream, pervasive technology that is accessible by any device, at any time and from any place. This means that speech-enabled applications should be accessible by standard telephones and cell phones, and by GUI (graphical user interface)-based devices like PDAs, tablet PCs, smart phones and desktop PCs. [Microsoft's vision] includes enabling the convergence of the Web infrastructure and voice systems into one infrastructure. With this convergence, speech-enabled and visual-only Web applications will become one unified application, developed using standard Web programming tools, based on Web standards and running on your existing Web infrastructure."