Revenue increase

Repetitive services like information kiosks are simply too expensive to be handled by contact centre agents. To date such services run on classical touchtone-based IVR systems. Speech recognition, however, may enrich the user interface in such a way that information can be retrieved and presented in various ways. As a direct result more applications will become available, hence driving revenue increase.

Customer retention and satisfaction improvement

Enterprises strive to build customer loyalty through different channels, but in the end the customers decide which communication channel they prefer. Speech technology can be one of these channels, and may offer a competitive advantage. The main condition though is that this be a pleasant experience and not a nerve-cracking one. As users overall get more exposed to speech applications, they will overcome the current reluctance to converse with machines. This will fortify the two previous drivers.

Cost reduction

Like most industries contact centres are under pressure to reduce costs, while they have to increase the level of service. Approximately 60-70% of the costs in contact centres are labour costs. For low value calls, English and French calls can be handled by offshore contact centres. This is not possible for smaller language groups like Dutch. Potential cost reductions will be accomplished through solutions that offer call avoidance (a.k.a. ‘self-service’) or call time reduction. Much is expected from speech technology, and the return on investment (ROI) is easy to calculate. Although the technology may not reach the same quality level of a human-to-human conversation, customers are willing to adapt as long as their requests are
fulfilled in an effective and timely way.

Indirect cost reductions are a result of the 24x7 availability, and the optimised supply-to-demand ratio for the offered calls.

Agile applications, fast implementation and low total cost of ownership

In a fast moving world the customer expects constantly changing content and more feature-rich applications. As with the Web, new generation speech-enabled applications must be as easy and flexible to implement. If the speech-based solutions are too cumbersome or too expensive to implement and to support during their lifetime, the business case will remain weak.

Leverage existing investments

Many enterprises have invested heavily in contact centre technologies with the expectation of operational savings, but have little to show for the effort because the investment is not aligned with current and near-term requirements. While e-mail and the Web continue to emerge as important channels, more focus must be placed on voice service capability, through which most customer contact activity still takes place.