2 Killer Apps for the Contact Center

Transcription

1 2 Killer Apps for the Contact Center Voice-Activated Self-Service and Virtual Contact Centers Norman Tyrrell Senior Marketing Manager Platform Solutions NMS Communications Ted Bray Senior Product Manager Global Voice Product Marketing Edify

2 NMS Innovators Webinar Advancing Communications with Voice Technology Twelve months of telecom industry and technology information Tailored for today s innovative solution developers Presented by NMS and their partner application industry leaders Complemented by hosted, on-line technology forums immediately following the webinar

3 Agenda Who is NMS? Meeting the CRM challenge Driving forces behind virtual contact center Developer s challenge Who is Edify? The cost of satisfying the customer What makes a great speech application Ticketmaster case study Q&A NMS Developer s Forum open chat room

4 About NMS Communications Leading provider of systems, system building blocks, and services for next-generation communications solutions With a focus on wireless, voice-driven applications, and packet infrastructure markets With a history of creating value for communications solution innovators: equipment suppliers, application developers and service providers based on NMS-built technologies and services Strategic relationships with technology partners Industry-leading supply chain and integration partnerships

5 NMS at a Glance Product Development Sales & SE support Channel Partners Headquarters 20+ years in telecom Products deployed in 90 countries 24/7 worldwide technical support Solid financial position ~500 employees in product development 0 ~150 in field, support

6 Why focus on contact centers? ($M) 6,000 Worldwide Customer Service and Contact Center Applications Revenue 5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000 ROW Asia/Pacific Western Europe North America 1, Source: IDC, October 2002

7 Putting Their Best Foot Forward In tough economic times, the focus on customer satisfaction and retention is even more important For many the contact center is the primary point of interaction with the customer BUT contact center managers are facing the operational challenge of improving service levels while keeping agent costs down

8 Meeting the CRM Challenge Speech-enabled Self-Service Access information Execute transactions Support mobile users Virtual Contact Centers Manage costs and service levels Number of virtual contact center agents in the United States is growing at a rate of 34% annually Source: Jupiter Media Metrix, 2002 Datamonitor, 2002

9 Virtual Contact Centers, Real Benefits Attract and retain highly skilled agents by offering the option of working at home Handle seasonal and peak fluctuations better Reduce facility costs Locate contact centers in areas where labor costs are lower Improve disaster preparedness

10 Leveraging a Remote Workforce Remote Agents 42% have a college degree or higher Traditional Agents 17% have a college degree or higher 27% have 5+ years experience 12% have 5+ years experience Contact center managers employing a remote workforce noted a 12 percent increase in productivity. Source: Jupiter Media Metrix, 2002

11 Making Remote Work, Work Build a communications infrastructure that doesn t create distinctions between in-house and remote agents Agents sitting at home should be able to work at the same speed and capability as those sitting in the office Voice quality of the remote agent must meet or exceed that of the traditional in-house staff

12 The Developer s Challenge: Solution Requirements An application infrastructure that works across both VoIP and existing TDM network Seamless integration and consolidation of all customer touch points, including IVR, contact center, predictive dialing, and voice messaging Full-featured conferencing, echo cancellation, and barge-in for support of agent monitoring/training and transaction logging

13 The Developer s Challenge: Solution Requirements Scalable application model, allowing applications to be built and easily support both small and large configurations without significant changes Hardware and operating system independence, making applications more portable, work with resource technologies from a variety of vendors Native support for automated speech recognition engines supplied by the recognized leaders in the ASR industry

14 The NMS Solution Natural Access TM software a consistent set of operating system independent APIs Complete platform building blocks based on highly scalable communications software, embedded computers, subsystems, and services Standards-based products with universal development environments suitable for telecom operators and enterprises Development environment that supports both TDM and VoIP

15 About Headquartered in Santa Clara, CA 180 employees More than 2,000 global customers Profitable subsidiary of S1 $53 million in 2001 revenues; 22% YOY growth 37,000+ IVR ports shipped in enterprise speech recognition customers 35,000+ speech recognition ports deployed since 1999 Natural Language Solutions Group (NLSG)

16 A Few Of Edify s Speech Customers

17 The Cost of Satisfying the Customer Cost per Resolved Issue $9.53 Chat $7.86 Online Self-Service $6.55 Phone Call Center $6.17 Phone Speech Interface $ $0.35 > Average ROI: 3-6 Months Source: Forrester Research, Giga, Nuance Courtesy: Marcello Typrin, Nuance

18 An Actual Speech Business Case Before Edify Speech: Live Agents. The application: city name pairs.

19 After Implementing Edify Speech

20 Do Customers Really Like Speech? SpeechWorks commissioned Gartner Survey January % of surveyed customers were satisfied or extremely satisfied with their experience with speech technology Customers preferred speech to touch-tone by a margin of 6:1 69% rated touch tone their least favorite form of automation What they did not like 19% felt speech was too impersonal 14% believed speech applications take longer to complete 14% thought the speech system had difficulty in understanding them

21 What Makes For A Great Speech Application? Great user interface Solid application design Core telephony integration & support Back office connectivity Order fulfillment

22 Putting It All Together

23 The Developer s Challenge: Case Study

24 Before Edify Silo home-grown IVR systems Routing calls Ticket ordering Call transfers to live agents The director agent IVR Similar to Directory Assistance Simulated speech reco Transfer to live agent Long hold times in director agent Limited accuracy Inconsistent customer experience Impossible to know how to staff director agents hot periods were difficult to predict

25 Edify Successful? 100,000 daily incoming calls to the new agent director application Edify successfully automates 80% of them Customer queue times eliminated Live agents are now completely focused on closing business and cross selling other offers (Sports Illustrated subscriptions, etc.) Goal was 50% automation success by December 2002 Purchased in December 2001, implemented in February 2002 By July 2002, 70% of Ticketmaster s live director agents had been redeployed

26 A Key Differentiator: Edify s NLSG Persona, branding and effective UI were critical elements to Ticketmaster ROI ROI ROI ROI ROI ROI ROI Most significant factor is call completion rates within the automation NLSG provided Ticketmaster with guaranteed call completion rates Provided powerful assurance that this project would be successful Unmatched UI design expertise Powerful speech creation tools and defined methods Many successful references Schwab, NYSE, Lloyds TSB, Nuance, SpeechWorks, Vocalis

27 Ticketmaster: Success From the Inside Out NLSG development focus on an efficient application Minimize call duration Optimal user experience through a streamlined process High quality dialog design Effective application design

28 Typical Speech Application Challenges Reducing call duration Maximizing call completion rates Maintaining the speech application Once the application has been deployed, non-speech recognition experts can easily maintain the application Content and the reasons callers are calling changes over time If dialog design and the speech recognition grammars are not being periodically maintained, recognition performance will deteriorate quickly

29 Ticketmaster Design Strategies Single-level re-prompting If a no-input or no-match error occurs in a dialog stage, the application will try one time to recognize a caller s response If that fails, the system will move on to the next dialog stage Short prompts with delayed help Each prompt is followed by an example of what the caller can say after a short pause The short pause invites callers who know what to say to barge-in, whereas hesitant callers get to hear an example of what they can say

30 Ticketmaster Design Strategies If collection of one piece of information fails, continue to next Sometimes, callers don t always have all the information for ticket booking; for example they might not know the venue for the event of interest The system is designed to be flexible and accepts an I don t know response at any stage It then continues to collect the next piece of information Thus, calls can still be successfully completed even though typically the call would have failed at the first dialog stage

31 Ticketmaster Design Strategies Get unique event information with minimal information provided The application checks at every turn in the dialog, whether already enough information has been provided to uniquely identify an event If an event is unique the system won t continue to ask for venue or date, but simply get a caller s confirmation that the correct event has been found Develop tools to update grammars A suite of tools has been developed that update the grammars of events and venues daily

32 Ticketmaster Design Strategies Utilize incomplete information provided by the caller The grammars have been coded to allow recognizing ambiguous event names Thus, in the case a caller speaks an ambiguous event name, the system will play a list of all matching events and lets the caller choose the event of interest This approach helps to maximize the call completion rate at the price of a slightly higher call duration due to playing a list

33 Ticketmaster Conclusions Edify speech application achieving higher completion rates than assisted-agent application it replaced Average call duration is 30 seconds, down over 30 seconds from the original pre-edify state

34 For more information Contact NMS Norman Tyrrell Edify Ted Bray April Unified Communications Are We There Yet?? with Voice Mobility International April 2, 2003 Watch for registration info at

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36 Q&A

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