How dangerous is texting while driving? Ask someone who is required to do it.
We've published statistics on the dangers of texting while driving, and as a speech recogniton company, we look at voice control as a possible solution. However, the best argument I've seen against texting while driving: oblige young people to text and drive during their driving test so they can see how dangerous it is. Brilliant.
The best links on customer service this week
Every week brings new studies, information and even good, old-fashioned books on the call center and how it can be used to improve customer service. We curate the content and bring you the best links on customer service for this first week of May:
It's not easy running a contact center in the age of Siri. Customer expectations of speech recognition are more complex and higher than ever, and traditional speech rec IVRs can't keep up. What is a call center to do?
If you think that smartphone usage doesn't affect the contact center, think again. Gartner reported that worldwide fourth quarter sales of smartphones in 2011 were estimated at 149 million. A Pew Internet survey found that as of May 2011, 35% of Americans owned a smartphone. JP Morgan predicted that 657 smartphones will leave stores in 2012. And the GSMA reported that second only to SMS messaging, native apps comprise the highest level of smartphone activity usage, capturing more than 20 minutes of average daily on-screen time.
And many of those apps are voice-controlled apps, Siri being the most popular among voice recognition tools.
The smartphone experience with speech recognition technology has already changed user expectations of interactions with automation in the contact center. Your callers might be wondering, "If Siri can understand me, why can't you?" The Siri Effect is hitting call centers hard, and all IVRs and call flow designs should be under scrutiny.
The truth is that in the age of Siri, DTMF (Dual Tone Multi Frequency signaling, or touch tone response such as "Push 1 for sales, 2 for billing," etc.) doesn't cut it anymore. And customer care facilities should see this trend in user sophistication with respect to speech recognition as an opportunity rather than a curse.
While user expectations might be the same for a call center IVR as for a mobile speech-enabled app, the two have until now been vastly different in their goals and structures. Take a look at the structure, context and business expectation for each:
And due to changing user expectations, the contact center is experiencing a major shift in perceived value. This goes beyond asking callers to rate their satisfaction with a particular agent or a single call; these shifted expectations in terms of speech recognition interactions affect the entire corporate culture and the contact center's reason for being.
In the call center world, the old paradigm was to see the contact center exclusively as a cost center. This drove the quality metric of Average Handle Time, because the less amount of time spent on the phone with the customer, the lower the cost, right? This also drove organizations to create DTMF menu trees: who cares if the caller has to listen to three levels of menus and make six menu choices, as long as the forced-choice DTMF menu is easy for the organization to create? The organization didn't hesitate to make the caller do the work of navigating the DTMF IVR menu, because this is a cost center, anyway, right?
The paradigm that contact centers must adopt is the one that users have now come to expect: the contact center is a customer loyalty engine, not a cost center. Average Handle Time must be replaced by First Call Resolution, which is what the customer (not the organization) truly cares about. Users now expect accurate speech recognition, which is a little more work for the organization to create compared to a forced-choice DTMF menu, but it is much easier and more natural for the user to navigate. And speech recognition makes the technology do the work, not the caller. This is the new benchmark created by Siri: use technology to focus on a friction-free customer experience.
Let's take a look at how the Automated Speech Recognition engines (ASR) work in a typical speech recognition IVR call flow within the contact center. Let's say that Acme Widgets, Inc. has a speech recognition IVR for call routing, and the first prompt asks the caller "How may I help you?" The caller makes some sort of speech utterance as the Reason for Call (RFC), which the engine then parses compares to a language model of dynamic data based on hundreds or thousands of caller response utterances and converts to text for reference and improvement.
Based on the comparison of the converted utterance to the language knowledge base, the RFC is categorized into one of a series of buckets, such as sales, billing, customer service or tech support. Then the call is routed to the correct agent skill.
Where most contact center ASRs fail in comparison to Siri is between the language model and categorization. Because call center grammars are traditionally narrow, it's common for any unexpected utterance to fail because the developers didn't anticipate exactly what the caller might say. In this highly structured environment, one unclear syllable can make the difference between a smooth caller experience and a frustrating one.
I'm not sure how other speech technologists have dealt with the rise in speech recognition expectations in the wake of Siri, but I'll share with you Spoken's solution to the issue. Since understanding the reason for call and identifying the caller are keys to accurate call routing, it's of vital importance that the speech recognition engine capture and interpret those caller utterances with near 100% accuracy.
However, within the structure of the contact center environment, even the very best ASRs out there only return about 50% accuracy for any one customer utterance. That means that even if the ASR understands nine digits of the phone number the caller utters, the system will still fail for lack of the tenth digit, and the caller will have a bad experience.
The Spoken approach is to support the technology with a hybrid solution: provide human Silent Guides that work in the background to correct those utterances that would otherwise fail. (If you're curious, find out more about how this works.) The Guides supplement the automation and bring the speech recognition accuracy level closer to 90%. If you're curious about the cost comparison, the quick answer is that because the Guides handles up to 10 simultaneous calls and reduce agent load, most customers experience a cost savings of about 15% over ASR alone.
What's really valuable is that the human safety net provides what pure ASRs can't: an additional layer of accuracy that improves speech recognition and keeps the experience closer to that of Siri.
Whatever approach organizations take to addressing the contact center in the age of Siri, the more sophisticated expectations of their customers can't be ignored. And while sites like GetHuman would suggest that what callers really want is a human agent, both Siri and studies have shown that users prefer automation over a live agent for simple tasks. And while 80% of callers will attempt to opt out or game the system when presented with a DTMF menu tree, over 90% will respond when asked an open-ended question such as, "How may I help you?"
Users are expecting more from speech-enabled IVRs than ever before. How is your organization addressing those heightened expectations?
Americans seek instant gratification more speedily than ever before--and businesses who can't keep up will lose.
One of the more fascinating statistics from this infographic is the growing number of people accessing information via their mobile phones. And they give up quickly if the page doesn't load immediately or if the browsing, service or e-commerce experience isn't quick and easy.
This begs the question: Is your customer service mobile ready for today's impatient consumers?
Created by: Online Graduate Programs
In an announcement that was shocking to some and shrugworthy to others, yesterday Gartner predicted the post-PC era by 2014, stating that most consumer tasks will be performed virtually, in the cloud.
Citing five consumer megatrends in personal computing, independent research firm Gartner is predicting that "the personal cloud will replace the personal computer at the center of users' digital lives"--in two short years, by 2014. The prediction is shocking not in its content but in the anticipated alacrity of adoption. Consumers are already relying heavily on smartphones and tablets for everyday tasks from banking to entertainment consumption to document creation. So where does that leave customer care?
A quick summary of the five megatrends cited by Gartner as driving this evolution in consumer usage:
GigaOm was quick to qualify Gartner's bold statement with a few words of caution. While many consumers do rely on a variety of devices for access, reliable broadband access is not yet universal. If you've ever paid $12.95 for two hours of Gogo inflight internet access, you can probably attest to this. The need for offline interaction still exists.
The article quotes Gartner analyst Steve Kleynhans as clarifying not the absolute death of the PC but the shift to multiple devices, including tablets and smartphones:
“Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices,” said Kleynhans. “Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life.”
Are we already in a post-PC world? Yeah, kinda, but it depends on how you define "post-PC world." We are also in a post-radio world in the sense that while radio still exists, it is no longer the sole delivery point for communications as it was in the 30s and 40s. Consumer communications tools and content consumption shifted from radio to television and then to the internet, but each medium still exists and adapted to the change.
The PC will continue to exist as a tool for content creation and collaboration, but it will be one of many, as opposed to the primary tool, suggests Wired magazine:
Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie made recently, saying, “People argue about, ‘Are we in a post-PC world?’. Why are we arguing? Of course we are in a post-PC world,” Ozzie is is reported to have said at a GeekWire-sponsored conference last week. ”That doesn’t mean the PC dies; that just means that the scenarios that we use them in, we stop referring to them as PCs, we refer to them as other things.”
Stop assuming that all online interaction will be PC-based. Take Gartner's prediction to mean that the PC is going the way of radio and television: still very much in our lives, but no longer the be-all and end-all of consumer computing. Rather, it is becoming a smaller part of a diverse system consumers use to access information and engage in communication. Consider the smartphone and the tablet in terms of customer service just as readily as the PC.
If the evolution of communication to the personal cloud occurs by 2014 as Gartner predicts, there will be two key areas of evolution for customer service:
In short, take into consideration the consumer need for self-service through a variety of devices, not just the phone and PC. And while you're at it, update your own infrastructure to a cloud platform so you'll be ready for the next wave of customer service trends.
SIP protocol has been around for years, but it's been gaining popularity in the contact center space. Why are call centers rushing to convert to SIP?
Frost & Sullivan revealed that the North American VoIP access and SIP trunking services market is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of more than 27 percent through 2016, eventually reaching $3.9 billion. TDM (Time-Division Multiplexing) is the legacy protocol for sending voice calls over copper wires. As TDM legacy infrastructures age, more and more are being converted to SIP (Session Internet Protocol), which has the advantage of sending multiple signal types (such as voice, video, chat and multimedia) over a single IP pipeline.
If you're like me, you don't have an engineering degree, but you might be charged with having an awareness both of contact center technologies and of opportunities to streamline cost and efficiency of interactions within the contact center. And as contact center infrastructure purchasing changes at its typical glacial rate, at what point do CIOs and CTOs consider the TDM to SIP conversion? And more importantly, what do we really need to know about SIP's advantages over TDM in the contact center space?
SIP is a protocol for controlling and directing communications, including voice, video and data, over IP (Internet Protocol). A good rough analogy would be to see SIP as the voice and data network on your smartphone and TDM as the voice-only, analog experience on a dial home phone. The analogy isn't entirely accurate, but you get the idea. SIP treats all communication--voice, data, video, instant messaging, whatever-- as software, using VoIP technology, and transfers it over IP.
What's cool about SIP isn't just the IP conversion; SIP Trunking is a single conduit for multimedia elements (voice, video and data) that allows multiple signal types to travel over the same pipeline. This is a huge advantage for call centers that often need to coordinate a voice call with caller data using a screen pop to an agent.
SIP Trunks are used to connect a company's private switch (Private Branch Exchange or PBX) to the public network using the internet instead of traditional analog phone circuits. SIP Trunking is the de facto standard for VoIP applications. This means that a service provider would offer a SIP trunk to facilitate communication between an organization's PBX and the public network. Or, I should say, "PBXs," since with SIP, it's easy to connect multiple locations to act as a single system. This model is especially effective when the call center utilizes at-home agents.
What does this mean for the contact center? An easier, more reliable, less expensive way to make voice calls and the data that so often must accompany them. That's why Frost & Sullivan is predicting such expansive growth in the market: with contact centers always seeking greater reliability at a reduced cost, SIP is an easy solution to dealing with the expense and limitations of TDM.
A quick summary of the basic benefits of SIP for contact centers:
With advantages such as these, it's hard to see why any contact center wouldn't convert to SIP. Still, SIP isn't the be-all and end-all of telephony and data transmission. Rather than make the full switch, some call centers opt to do a partial SIP converstion: accept the incoming call as TDM, convert to SIP for easy data handling, and then convert back to TDM to send to agents, who might not have the broadband strength to accept a SIP call.
What is your take on SIP conversion? Has your call center made the switch? Why or why not?
2012 will bring shifts to the cloud, to SIP, to at-home agents and show the big data winners
This year has seen a lot of changes in the call center space. Within an industry that is notoriously slow to change and embrace new technology, 2012 is going to buck that trend and show some major shifts in the industry. My predictions for 2012:
Welcome, 2012. It's going to be a fun ride.
If you've ever feared a bad customer service incident going viral, don't read this; you'll have nightmares for weeks.
The blogosphere has been abuzz with the stunningly bad customer service one gamer received from a third-party marketing company charged with PS3 controller overlays. I wrote an overview of the kerfuffle from the PR point of view here and continue to add updates.
The quick summary: Dave (the customer) pre-orders a PS3 controller overlay, paying in advance in full with the promise of early December delivery. Early December comes and goes; no word. Dave emails Ocean Marketing to inquire about the delivery date (remember, he's already paid in full) and receives short email from Paul Christoforo saying only "december 17" without so much as a capital letter or period. Dave asks for more details. An increasingly condescending, bullying and punctuation-free series of emails ensues, with Chrisotoforo ranting at Dave, telling Dave to "put on your big boy hat and wait like everyone else" and "you think you speak for billions son your just a kid you speak for yourself no one cares what you think that’s why were growing and moving 20-50 thousand controllers a month."
Dave brings the email exchange to Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade and founder of PAX, who posts the content online and contacts Christoforo to cancel his booth at PAX. The internet explodes with critiques of Christoforo's unbelievably bad customer service.
What has made the debacle interesting to follow is the pure schadenfreude of it all--Christoforo, the most clueless of the clueless, had no idea that his simple customer service email exchange would become public. With every blustering defense he tried to make, he only made things worse. When his gaming contacts disavowed him, he called them names publicly via Twitter. When he got flamed, he changed his Twitter account, but internet gamers quickly discovered the ploy and posted his new account name.
When he half-heartedly apologized, it was only for underestimating Dave's and Krahulik's level of influence, saying "I underestimated you and its cost me a lot of trouble thousands of spam emails , a lot of personal bashing , and internet spam and trouble and just overall stress with my wife and newborn." Notice that he never actually apologizes for being rude or for the product delay, just for doing so to someone with influence. Even Geico jumped in on the fun, lightheartedly mocking the poor customer service with a hilarious Tweet.
Now, Christoforo and Ocean Marketing have become synonymous with ultimately bad, disrespectful and supremely ineffective customer service. There is a meme to this effect, and a Cheezburger page set up just to mock the hapless marketer.
There are quite a few lessons to be learned from the Ocean Marketing debacle:
While not everyone has the luxury of the candidate pool that Google has, it might be worth it to consider asking interview questions such as, "You receive this email from a customer who has paid up front for a controller overlay, but we just discovered the controllers are held up in China and won't be delivered before Christimas as promised. What do you do?"
Hint: If the candidate replies with, "I'd go into a rant and blame him for being an idiot because I don't think he's influential and it's not my job to make nice with customers, anyway," don't hire him.
