Is Speech An Answer?

Forrester Research found that speech interfaces significantly increase usability and comfort for customers, while delivering greater benefits and cost savings. All the companies interviewed found that their systems met or exceeded their expectations in reducing the number of calls to the contact center.

When you compare speech to touchtone, the same study found that speech offers significant advantages over touchtone interfaces in business benefits and customer service. In a recent Harris Interactive Customer Experience Survey, speech won over DTMF by an average of eight to one. Using speech cuts the zero-out rate by up to 30% and reduces misdirected calls by up to 50% [6]. Companies saw the following performance improvements when implementing speech self-service [7]:

• 100% improved performance in call abandonment rates
• 95% improved customer satisfaction
• 92% improved first contact closure rate
• 67% lowered their cost per contact

Our Experience

Fluency has six implementations of speech applications in the Financial Services sector, and has excellent experience of this sector and the demands of your customers. Our success stories include Standard Life Bank, Chelsea Building Society, Barclays, and Outright.

We have responded to call center challenges with the Virtual Speech Agent (VSA) Suite. Based on proven speech recognition technology, VSA offers a selection of solutions that enable organizations to not only automate the calls coming into their call center, but also to change and maintain the system internally. Our view is that speech self-service should be an integrated channel in your wider channel strategy. This integrated approach will:

• Multiply the value from any existing investments in CRM – Helping to exploit up-sell/cross-sell opportunities and resulting in sticky content delivery.
• Leverage existing investments in technology – Creating a consistent interaction across web and voice, using the same customer database integration points, and providing reporting data that can be used by your business reporting systems.
• Leverage existing investments in branding – Reflect a corporate persona, ensure that key messages are always used, and target the prompts based upon customer segmentation.

The Benefits

Reduction in Cost –  Eliminating routine and repetitive tasks means that not only are fewer agents required but existing agents are left free to tackle complex tasks. Automating the routine call types with a Fluency solution results in implementation timescales of weeks rather than months, creating an excellent ROI.

Enhanced Customer Service – Fluency can deliver your solution On-Demand or On-Site. This ensures always-on availability, giving customers 24x7 access to information and the ability to have enquiries dealt with rapidly and efficiently. Combining VSA applications with live agents allows you to carry out simple information requests quickly with a virtual agent, while the more complex calls can be routed directly to a live agent. This will have a positive effect on reducing queuing and time-to-answer performance.

Improved Caller Experience – Callers can speak normally in their own words to achieve their desired destinations. From a routing perspective, this eliminates callers' frustration with listening to a continuous loop of menu choices when using traditional touch-tone solutions. However our solutions support touchtone as well as speech, giving callers the best of both worlds.

Operational Flexibility – The VSA web management console allows for easy configuration, enabling you to experiment with service improvements or make real-time changes without incurring external costs.