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| According to Gartner analysts, 92 percent of customer interactions happen over the phone. That's a huge number for any organization and makes a strong case for more effective phone communication. Companies have continued to provide multiple methods to serve their customer needs, including the Web, but global cell phone subscriber growth continues to outpace Internet user growth, indicating that the phone service channel will continue to be an extremely important communication medium for the foreseeable future. The vast majority of phone interactions begin in some type of automated application, which are deployed with the goal of enabling customers with low to medium complexity questions or needs to serve themselves. These systems almost always include DTMF, or touch-tone IVRs, and many companies are also deploying speech recognition technologies in their automated offerings as well. Having a complete understanding of customers' experiences in these automated applications is imperative—as they act as a "welcome mat" to the majority of customer experiences. | |
| Recently deployed speech applications, as well as existing IVRs, are typically designed and deployed with clear understanding of the business objectives these systems are designed to achieve. For example, most organizations deploy these types of applications to save money—according to Forrester Research, the average cost of a live customer service agent phone call ranges from $5 to $15, compared to the majority of self-service interactions that typically cost no more than a dollar or two per transaction. The challenge to date has been that user goals are much more difficult to identify, and information and reporting is often limited or unavailable to analyze the true user behavior in these systems. Most IVR Applications rely on high-level volumetric data, anecdotal evidence or incomplete user surveys for improvement answers, resulting in systems that are poorly designed and subsequently do not meet user goals. The ability to monitor and measure actual user behavior in interactive voice response (IVR) and speech-enabled applications enables identification and improvement of problem areas that cause user drop-off or confusion and additionally define areas where automation can be extended to better serve customer requests. In order to optimize any system, organizations must identify how they are going to measure the success of the system. Self Service applications such as IVRs are no different in this regard. If cost reduction is one of the system objectives, then measuring how successful the system is in containing and self-serving customers inside the system—and avoiding the costly live agent phone call—should be one of the measures. In this case, understanding the user behavior inside the system is essential to knowing whether or not the user goals are aligned with the system objectives. Many IVR applications not only do not meet user goals, but also fail to deliver the expected cost reductions due to sub optimal design. Why? Because today, many IVR systems are modified on gut feelings, subjective guesses or anecdotal, random information about what customers want—not with hard data about the users' behavior and desires. Then companies spend millions of dollars on new technology to improve the IVR system, such as speech recognition, in an attempt to "fix" the problem. However, the root cause is still unresolved, and since companies do not have a way of factoring in actual users' behavior systematically, the new technology falls short of its potential just as its' predecessor. A new approach to IVR/Speech design and modification is necessary to enable companies to manage IVR business performance. Understanding user behavior is critical in order to match business objectives to those of the customers. For example, if 50,000 people call the IVR/Speech system each day, but 10,000 of them leave the system without completing their purpose, companies need to know why. The best way to align these factors is by focusing on user behavior—understanding how customers are acting once inside your IVR/Speech system, and subsequently incorporating that insight with existing customer and transactional information. Leveraging these knowledge bases to drive user-behavior based IVR/Speech improvements. Customer Behavior Intelligence technology can help organizations monitor and measure user actions in interactive systems, including speech recognition applications. Speech applications are unique in their implementation, in that they typically involve a lengthy tuning process to optimize the success of the application. Customer Behavior Intelligence can improve the effectiveness, speed the time-to-benefit and increase the associated ROI for Speech deployments. Specifically, Customer Behavior Intelligence can be leveraged to achieve the following items:
Customer Behavior Intelligence can be deployed on current DTMF IVRs before speech applications—that way managers can look at existing systems and get an understanding of current behavior and identify areas where deployment of speech applications would be most effective. For example, it might make sense to deploy speech within an application with low throughput resulting from a complex set of steps. If speech applications are already deployed, Customer Behavior Intelligence can specifically help organizations understand how customers are utilizing Speech applications, highlighting areas of sub optimal performance in three specific areas: Grammar Customer Behavior Intelligence helps organizations identify points in their system in which customers are being routed to customer service representatives. For example, if a customer calls his or her local phone company and utters "state-to-state calling" and the application does not recognize this utterance as being "in grammar," the customer will likely end up pressing zero to talk with a customer service agent. By utilizing Customer Behavior Intelligence along with a transcription service, organizations can identify bottlenecks in their system and also words and phrases that might need to be added to the system. Confidence Quite often the speech application recognizes what a customer says, but does not with the level of confidence needed to route the customer. Customer Behavior Intelligence allows organizations to combine the visibility of what the caller said, as well as the confidence level assigned by the system, enabling visibility into confidence problems. Dialog Customer Behavior Intelligence will provide organizations with a map of how, in aggregate, customers navigate through an IVR or speech application. The map will show deviations from the expected flow, and the implications of these deviations. For example, if customers continue to get caught in a disambiguous state, rather than efficiently moving through the billing application and on to pay their bill, this deviation and its' impacts will be clearly understood with customer behavior intelligence. Conclusion With behavioral insight, companies can better balance and meet business objectives. The key to optimizing business performance is to turn meaningful observation and analysis into new, value-driving action. About Dr. Tal Cohen, Ph.D: | |
Published: Wednesday, August 4, 2004
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