WHAT TO REMEMBER

Ask yourself what your call center is trying to do. Speech automation shouldn't be about keeping calls away from your agents. It should be about self-service and streamlining the simple things. Genesys' Bob Thronsen advises, "Things that are unusual or non-predictable shouldn't be automated. You can, by listening to what goes on in call centers, identify what's commonly asked."

Further, says Rex Stringham, not all automation needs to be speech-enabled. "The biggest mistake we see being made is the wholesale replacement of touchtone with speech recognition, under the assumption that pressing buttons is why people hate IVR. Don't do this. Many callers actually prefer touch-tone to speech recognition for privacy, speed, or when there is background noise. So allow customers to choose the user interface that best meets their needs."

Your customers' needs should be considered with equal weight to those of the enterprise. "Application design should be an extension of customer behavior -- understanding the customer's needs and creating an application that meets those needs is prudent," says Datamonitor analyst Daniel Hong. "This will improve the caller experience and subsequent user adoption -- the ultimate goal for any customer-facing speech application."

Next, decide if hosting is right for your enterprise. TuVox's Pollock says the three things your call center should have are efficiency, redundancy, and expertise. Does your company have the call volume to warrant owning a system? Can you afford to build back-up systems in different physical locations? Do you have the in-house expertise? The resources to maintain a speech system? If you don't, then hosting is a good solution.

Voxify's Amit Desai agrees: "Unless it is your company's core competency to build speech applications, you should not be developing it yourself. You should apply your IT resources to working with the speech application company to integrate the technology with your back-end technology that only you understand."

And many vendors suggested starting small. Desai again: "While a full-scale solution may look to meet your company's long-term needs, it may prove too risky to start out with given the changes in standards and technology. Look for speech solutions that can bring short-term measurement points so that you can monitor and assess the technology and then expand usage based on success."

PAUL ENGLISH AND THE ANTI-IVR MEDIA WAVE

Paul English has made himself a minor celebrity out of one complaint: he had trouble getting through to an agent. The Internet entrepreneur and blogger made an "IVR Cheat Sheet" that listed more than 100 companies with tips on how to bypass their IVRs to speak with an agent. Now, dozens of radio, newspaper, and TV interviews later, he has a new website -- gethuman.com -- with even more tips on getting an operator.

Angel.com's response was swift. CEO Mike Zirngibl fast-tracked the company's IVR University idea and attached it to the Paul English media wave, landing himself a short profile in the Boston newspaper that first interviewed English.

Some were skeptical, including the blogger who goes by the name "Cogitating Call Center Manager." In an entry entitled "Angels with Dirty Faces" he agreed that the problem is not intrinsic to IVRs -- bad design is the real problem -- but reminds us that when the call center thinks like a business, it forgets what's good for the caller.

"Your customers are going to figure out a way to get to an agent anyway, regardless of the barriers you put up," said VocaLabs co-founder Peter Leppik. "All you're really doing is increasing the frustration and decreasing the satisfaction, forcing people to call back multiple times."

Rex Stringham of EIG: "Paul English only addressed one common problem with IVR and that is that many enterprises try to "lock" callers into an IVR by hiding the operator option. This has never been a user interface design best practice. Well-designed IVR and speech recognition systems always have a straightforward option to reach live answer.

"There are good reasons to hate IVR and speech recognition, but it's not the technology's fault. There are dozens of ways to make IVR more efficient, effective and satisfying for customers. The good news is that well-designed IVR systems are actually preferred by customers over live answer, and customers complain when well-designed IVR systems are taken away."

Convergys' Bill Andrews: "I'm not sure the speech industry served itself well with the initial way speech providers approached the market, in the sense that it was all about ROI, ROI, ROI, and not a lot about customer satisfaction." Speech automation isn't supposed to replace agents. "What we at Convergys are trying to do in the speech application environment is what ATMs did to the banking industry a couple decades ago. It did not displace the tellers at banks -- it created a new experience where people could get ubiquitous access."

Stringham's final words were pointed. "The IVR and speech recognition industry needs to focus on good user interface design to avert customer backlash. Paul English offers no real solutions. He's had his 15 minutes of fame and now he needs to sit down and shut up."

PRICING MODELS FOR HOSTED SPEECH SERVICES

There are three basic ways that hosted speech service providers price their services: per-minute, per-port, and per completed call. All three are measures of volume, but the last one takes the success of the call into account.

Bob Thronson of Genesys, a company that makes speech platforms for hosting providers, points out, "if you have a lousy speech application it can take a lot of minutes or ports, so why should the enterprise have to pay for that? The completed call approach aligns the service provider with what the enterprise is looking for." TuVox charges either per completed call or by the minute -- the customer can decide. TellMe's pricing model is negotiable -- per call, per minute -- it's up to the client.

All of Angel.com's services are priced by the minute. Mike Sweeney, Angel's director of marketing says, "This pay-as-you-go pricing model means that a customer's only expense is that which creates business value -- usage." Angel.com's speech systems are very easy to set up. They boast that you may never need to actually talk to them -- choosing, designing, and implementing an automated speech system is all done on the Web.

Voxify and BeVocal both charge by the minute too. A BeVocal representative told me, "This not only mitigates risk for the client, but also provides the appropriate incentive for BeVocal to overachieve. In other words, with a per minute pricing model, BeVocal is motivated to drive up automation rates, thereby increasing the number of minutes that the company handles and consequently the revenue that it earns from its clients."

Rex Stringham's advice: "Insist on having your vendor commit to service level agreements. That is, the vendor should only get paid if they meet mutually-agreed performance objectives. If the vendor is not willing to "put their money where their mouth is" then they don't really have confidence in their ability to deliver. If they are willing, then you "lock in" the return on investment."

Convergys' pricing seems unnecessarily complex. They told us: "Convergys doesn't have just one pricing model for hosted speech. Our pricing structure is basically grouped into two areas: the one time Professional Services pricing and Recurring. For Professional Services, the client pays for such things as application development, project management, and tuning the applications, etc. This is more on a per event basis. The Recurring aspect is more on the platform side and we offer a variety of pricing solutions for clients. There is the more straightforward approach of pricing per transaction or per minute. And then there is what we call "value based" pricing. We have different pricing based on whether the entire call interaction can be completed within the automation itself, or if the interaction can be handled up to a point with automation but then must go to a live agent to complete the call, or if the call interaction goes directly to a live agent to complete."

Speaking of Speech

These are the speech vendors and consulting firms you can start your explorations with.

Angel.com
888-692-6435

BeVocal
650-210-8600

Convergys
800-344-3000

CPT International
866-388-8358

Datamonitor
212-686-7400

EIG
888-344-4487

Genesys
888-GENESYS

TellMe
650-930-9000

TuVox
408-625-1700

VocaLabs
952-941-6580

Voxeo
800-305-5771

Voxify
510-545-5000

West
800-762-3800