“I didn’t understand that – please say it again.” All too often this is the negative experience consumers have with interactive voice recognition (IVR) and speech recognition software. The technology seems very fragile, easy to confuse and often plain irritating.
At least, that has been the perception up to now. Speech recognition software was hampered by the Star Trek illusion of natural conversational style interactions with computers – sadly, that level of artificial intelligence is still a long way off. There have also been some technical challenges that have hampered growth in the technology’s take up, such as slowness and a lack of applications.
Finding your voice
That all may be changing as speech recognition gets more robust and is being used increasingly by organisations as a way to interact with the customer.
A recent survey of use of speech for instance identified applications in travel and transport, public sector, utilities and retail banking – ranging from checking arrival times, location of council services, meter readings or finding the nearest ATM. While many companies see online as the best first call for customer self-service support there does seem to be a growing niche for speech as an adjunct to call centre functionality. So is it time to revise not just the consumer perception of speech but also that of the sceptical CIO?
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Shona Fraser, director of revenue and reservations, Travelodge
CIO UK spoke to four organisations regarding their successful implementations of a speech channel: utility Bournemouth & West Hampshire Water, budget hotel chain Travelodge, travel firm First Choice and Bss, an outsourced contact centre for the public sector.
Mike Sylvester is IT project manager at Bournemouth Water, which has implemented a voice recognition payments system for its 420,000 users. He told CIO UK how while the company had been able to accept payment cards for a few years, “due to the potential impact on our call centre we had not publicised this service”. Speech recognition, he says, has been the main way to solve the problem as the automated system avoids extra call traffic to the organisation’s call centre advisors. “We see this as key to improving customer service, making the service available 24-hour and in the long term increase speed of payment and lower bad debt issues through offering this option.”
Sylvester sees scope for functionality like customer account balance checks, direct debit sign up and general call routing as other future uses of speech.
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