In my last post I talked about two important rules of thumb that we use to identify transactions that would be good candidates for speech automation self service – Following the Traffic and How Long is a Typical Call.  The benefits are high.  Choosing the right transactions will deliver the highest savings and customer satisfaction.  But, choosing the wrong functions will waste resources and could cause customer satisfaction problems.

Now let's take a look at the technology and the business considerations:

What Can the Technology Do?
To be honest, speech automation finds recognizing email IDs very challenging (but it will come eventually). If you have a high volume transaction, and it's short and repetitive, check with us to get an idea of how well the technology can handle that transaction. We have created amazing applications, like name and address, that you might not think would work well but they do.  Understanding the technical feasibility needs to be included in the business use as well. While speech may not provide 95%+ success rates on a given task, that might be okay for your specific business needs.  For example, if I’m sending a contract letter out to a customer, I may need accuracy higher than speech can provide on the “name” field.  But in many other cases, the only people seeing the customer names are agents, so a minor misspelling would be tolerable. Understanding what the technology can do relative to your business needs is an important consideration.

What Are Other Business Constraints?
We see a good number of cases where a transaction has all the potential of becoming a successful self-service call, but other “business reasons” override this automation and the call end up going to an agent.  In most cases, there is a well thought out reason – the caller will be provided a sales opportunity, they are behind on payments, etc.  Basically, the business wants to speak to that person, so automation is skipped either for specific callers or the entire function is not automated.  We see this in sales functions, dispute cases and complaints, etc.  You know your business and the value of speaking with the caller – you’ll need to do the analysis on whether this outweighs the possible benefits from automation.

By starting with these simple rules of thumb, you can start laying out your plans to bring self-service benefits to your company and your customers.