Their blog posting, "Testing is Good. Successfully Implementing Change is Harder" from last Thursday talks about VocaLabs' SectorPulse quarterly reports on mobile phone companies. They just got their latest report data, and as an example, VocaLabs' Rick Rappe discusses T-Mobile:

T-Mobile obviously spent gosh knows how many $$$ to install some new IVR late in 2004. The result? Average business transaction length didn't change, meaning they saved no telco expense. The IVR picked up about 10% more of their calls, but caller frustration also rose by 10% and 24% of callers now have to call back more than once when a year ago it was 15%. So whatever savings they hoped to realize in agent overhead was lost since the added 10% of IVR handled calls is offset by a 9% increase in multiple calls from the same customer.

This is interesting. I'm researching speech recognition, particularly hosted systems, for our April issue, and I've been asking myself: is the goal of all speech rec and IVR systems merely to cut down on agent talk time? What if that doesn't happen?

When I was talking to our technical editor Joe Fleischer about speech rec, he warned that companies shouldn't assume that what's good for the business is good for the customers. People don't always want to talk to the IVR, even for simple transactions, and if those who need an agent have trouble getting to one, your customers are going to tell you there's a problem with your system, even if you, the call center manager doesn't think so.

But IVR and speech systems are also for customer efficiency, right? They really do speed up simple transactions like looking up flight numbers or checking balances. These are things for which talking to an agent would seem tedious, and besides, we don't want to wait for agents just for a simple question.

VocaLabs' report suggests that (like the blog entry's title says) even when you know what to do to fix a problem, doing it isn't always easy.

Rick Rappe writes: "In sum, while I have no doubt they gave a good presentation, the data we collected shows that for whatever reason they didn't manage to actually improve the customer experience." So T-mobile did not improve service, but changed the way the service fell short. Compare this to what Rappe said about "negative loyalty" -- that while lots of T-Mobile customers get mad and switch mobile providers, so do the customers of the other mobile providers. It's basically a reshuffling: no one loses or gains.