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North American Speech Applications Development Market for Contact Centers
Frost & Sullivan, March 2010, Pages: 49
About two-thirds of North American contact center organizations have plans to either build or enhance their contact center speech applications over the next twelve months based on a Frost & Sullivan survey conducted in 2009. This research study provides an overview of the speech application development market for contact centers, discusses market trends, challenges, drivers and restraints to adoption, and profiles about 25 leading vendors that provide speech application development services for contact centers.
Automated applications, such as for self-service, have been deployed in support of customer service for more than xx years. These applications typically are built to operate on interactive voice response (IVR) systems and more recently also on voice portal systems. The primary business driver for the creation and deployment of these applications is to reduce the operating costs of supporting routine customers' requests for information and assistance. Automated applications cost less to than live customer service agents—in the range of one-tenth of the cost/customer request processed. It is for this cost reduction business driver that companies strive for high usage rates for their IVR and voice portal applications by making them as functional and user-friendly as possible.
For most of these past xx years of IVR application use the primary calling customer interface has been voice prompts outputs and DTMF (Dual Tone Multi-Frequency or TouchTone) inputs from the callers. DTMF tones, recognized by the system, drive the callers' dialogues with applications. For example, in a basic call steering application, the caller is transferred to the sales department when she presses the 1 key on her telephone after hearing the prompt 'Thank You for calling XYX Corp., Press 1 for Sales or Press 2 for Service.' For sophisticated applications more caller options will be required. It is not uncommon for applications as straightforward as obtaining a checking account balance or to transfer funds from savings to checking accounts at a bank to require callers make a series of decisions. Each set of choices the caller is presented with is called a menu, for example: 'press 1 for x, press 2 for y, press 3 for z'. Levels of menus are called nested menus. Many callers find large numbers of choices and nested menus confusing and frustrating to work with. When callers have difficulty with self-service applications they often quit using the application and try to connect with a live customer service agent, thus reducing the live call avoidance value of the automated application.
As speech recognition technology and recognition accuracy have improved over the past ten years, more and more customer contact applications have been built with speech instead of DTMF interfaces. The primary business driver for the creation and deployment of speech applications—to reduce the operating costs of supporting routine customers' requests for information and assistance—is the same as with DTMF-based applications. What is different is the acceptance/usage rates for speech applications tend to be higher than for comparable DTMF-based applications. Customer attribute their higher usage of speech applications to the following:
- application navigation can be more direct ('What is your destination airport?' vs.' Press 1 for Albany, Press 2 for Altoona, Press 3 for Atlanta...')—easier and faster to use,
- generally viewed as more natural and therefore more desirable to use—more like speaking with a live person,
- with speech inputs and outputs callers can interact with applications in hand-free mode and where DTMF may not be available.
As with a number of other technologies and applications being used in customer contact speech brings opportunities to both contain/reduce operating costs and increase customer satisfaction/loyalty through improved customer experiences. It is for these reasons that more than xx% of North American enterprises have already deployed speech applications and more than xx% plan to use speech in some or all of their new customer contact applications over the next 12 to 18 months (source: Frost & Sullivan survey).
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