July/August 2001

 
Bridging The Customer Service Gap With Voice

BY MELISSA FREELS

[ Go Right To: The Web's Next Phase: Voice Commerce ]

To address these needs, companies are adopting real-time interaction technologies -- specifically voice on the Internet services. Budget constraints being what they are, most companies don't have the financial resources to invest in the equipment and personnel needed to implement and maintain such technologies. But with their competitors just a click away, they don't necessarily have time to wait.

Enter the ASP "solution," which allows companies to voice-enable their online efforts for a fraction of the cost of installing an Internet telephony system at their call centers. Just a few lines of HTML code, provided by the ASP, will put a live voice link on a Web site, e-mail message, or banner ad.

After exploring the options, California-based BriteSmile, signed on with an ASP to add a voice call button to the company's Web site. With a push of a "Smile Advice" button, site visitors have an immediate voice connection via phone or computer to the company's call center, which is staffed by 50 agents. With a call center of that size, one might have expected BriteSmile, the developer of an innovative teeth-whitening treatment offered at 2,500 locations nationwide, to choose to own their solution.

But according to Adam Flint, head of BriteSmile's Web site and consumer response efforts, "Integration is still quite a complex procedure with most of the Internet telephony systems on the market. The companies may claim it's a 'pull-out-of-the-box' system, but it's still not there yet. Plus, it's a very expensive proposition. By working with an ASP to add voice to our Web site, we get to evaluate how important voice call capabilities are to Internet users without dealing with integration hassles or making a large capital investment. We only pay for completed calls."

The "Smile Advice" button first appeared online in February and has been used by approximately 200 customers weekly ever since. "People still like to talk to people, especially if what they're discussing is of a personal nature or is perceived to be complex," said Flint. "We have found that people feel much more at ease when discussing our service over the phone."

According to Flint, there are tremendous advantages of communicating with prospects and consumers by voice rather than e-mail -- or even text chat. "Consumers get frustrated by e-mail. There's a time lag from the moment they actually click send and the time we can respond," he said.

Research shows that Flint is right: E-mail-only communication yields unsatisfactory results for consumers -- and that may mean a loss of business for the company. A study by Jupiter Communications revealed that only 29 percent of sites responded to an e-mail inquiry within six hours; another 29 percent took more than three days to respond -- or just didn't respond at all.

Most consumers react to delay by spending their money elsewhere. After all, 90 percent of online shoppers said they made purchasing decisions based on the quality of service a company offered, according to a Forrester Research report. And, dissatisfied customers don't hesitate to tell others about the poor service they received.

BriteSmile also tried a text chat solution for seven months but eventually decided to remove it from the Web site. Not only was it an impersonal way to communicate with valued customers, but the provider placed limits on the number of simultaneous chat sessions. By switching to a real-time voice service, the number of customers being served at any given time is only limited to the number of agents available. If all lines are busy, Internet users who press the "Smile Advice" button are given priority in the call queue.

"With our teeth-whitening service, people want details about what they're going to get and about what the treatment entails," said Flint. "If they click the 'Smile Advice' button, we can answer all their questions in a very personal manner, in a matter of seconds." Given the low cost to implement the service, Flint can already say the decision to use a voice service from an ASP has been a profitable venture.

"By talking with us one-to-one, customers are able to get an understanding of the quality of business and the quality of our people. Through those personal conversations, we're able to establish relationships with prospects and customers and make them feel comfortable and confident about doing business with us," he said. "That, alone, is a good return on investment."

WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN AN ASP
In addition to BriteSmile, many other companies, including Club Med, Datek, and Lightware, have selected ASP solutions to communicate with their customers online by voice. If your company is considering adding voice call capabilities to your Web site, e-mail marketing, or online advertising, BriteSmile's Adam Flint has suggested a few things to keep in mind:

• Assess the quality of the ASP's current clients and check references. Find out what their experience with the ASP has been, in terms of everything from implementation assistance to day-to-day customer care and support
  
• Test the service. If the ASP has a demonstration button on their site, try it. If not, request an in-person demo so they can show you how the service works on other customers' sites. Even better, ask them to mock up a Web page with a button that rings directly to your call center or front desk. Believe it or not, says Flint, some of the suppliers he originally considered presented demos that didn't work.

Melissa Freels is a member of the E-commerce Product Marketing team at ITXC Corp, a leading provider of worldwide Internet voice services. ITXC's patented Push to Talk service enables companies to add real-time voice communication capabilities to their Web sites, e-mail campaigns, and banner ads. She can be reached at [email protected].

[ Return To The July/August 2001 Table Of Contents ]

BY STEPHEN D. AVALONE

Speech technology has helped create exciting new frontiers for call centers and the Web. As the speech technology market begins to consolidate we see three primary segments of "voice services" emerging. Voice portals, as they're known, concentrate on consumer services such as access by telephone to information like e-mail, stock quotes, weather, and horoscopes. Other voice companies focus on enterprise applications such as corporate intranets to voice-enable field and sales force automation applications. But so far the most successful adoption of speech recognition-based technology is voice commerce -- the ability to perform actual Web transactions such as purchasing products and tracking the order in real time -- by speaking into any telephone.

What's different about voice commerce? Voice commerce combines an automatic speech recognition interface, text-to-speech technology, and extensible markup language (XML) to deliver a turnkey solution to businesses looking to improve their customer service while dramatically reducing costs. It's a step beyond traditional interactive voice response (IVR) and Internet voice portals because it integrates data across all channels. When the call is finished, the online transaction is also finished, just as if the user was at the Web site typing and clicking with the mouse. To IT directors and call center managers, the result looks the same, which means they don't have to duplicate their efforts minding different systems that serve the same purpose. With true integration of information across databases, the Web, and phones, any company can invite the 1.3 billion telephone users worldwide to buy or seek self-service from their Web sites and back-end systems. Voice commerce opens the door to full real-time e-commerce by phone, and by the same token ushers call centers into the next phase of customer relationship management (CRM) -- advanced speech recognition for customer self care. Research suggests that touch-tone IVR has mostly failed to fill the automation gap. For example, according to the Frost & Sullivan industry report, "Speech Over Touchtone in the Interactive Voice Response Market" (published 2000), about 50 percent of all callers hang up or press zero when confronted with touch-tone automation.

Clearly, removing human interaction completely is not an answer. And yet, by applying high-quality automation to the appropriate inquiries, organizations free human resources for these complex interactions. What's more, the telephone is still one of the main contact channels and the most cost effective. The same Frost & Sullivan research also shows that a large percentage of the 50 percent who reject conventional IVR will attempt to complete the transaction using advanced speech recognition. That's what voice commerce is banking on. In the final analysis, automation has to enhance customer service, not hinder or replace it.

THE HIGH-MAINTENANCE CUSTOMER
One catalyst for effective customer self-service confronts retail call centers in particular: The "unsatisfiable customer." Once upon a time, store prices included healthy margins that paid for well-staffed stores and call centers. Customer service was good because the margins could support it. E-commerce turned the tables, with unlimited product selection and lower prices. However, the slimmer margins meant e-tailers could no longer provide such high levels of customer service.

Voice commerce promises to satisfy these new high-maintenance customers who want great service, low prices, and large selections. Voice commerce extends the telephone to the new culture of customer self-care that e-commerce has created, where many consumers find answers to their own queries on company Web sites. For example, voice commerce lets customers browse product selections, place an order, and track that order's changing status by speaking to the retailer's Web-based online systems, over the telephone. Result? Current implementations are actively saving more than 80 percent of the cost of live representatives.

The year 2001 may not look -- or sound -- like 2001, A Space Odyssey. But it will be the year that using your voice to conduct commerce transactions and access effective self-service from the Internet finally became viable for customer service and prudent business.

E-commerce has proven that many consumers are willing to seek solutions to their problems via self-service technologies. Voice commerce blends friendly, advanced speech recognition with online self-service techniques to automate routine customer inquires and purchases, catalog and store location requests, order status calls, and product ordering. Customers accustomed to using the Web find it an easy jump to doing the same things by speaking into a phone.

Businesses need a cost-effective, no-fuss way to provide customer self care and to transform Web commerce into voice commerce without changing existing IT infrastructure. But what business and IT implementation strategies will win out for voice commerce? Voice commerce solutions that extend entire Web sites to phone users without changing existing infrastructure seem to be in the lead.

Where we go from there is...anybody's call.

Stephen D. Avalone is the vice president of marketing for NetByTel, Inc. NetByTel provides voice access to the Web with the first speech recognition platform that allows online purchasing using only a telephone. NetByTel's technology powers voice commerce, enabling businesses to expand into new markets, enhance their customer support capabilities, and lower their sales costs.

[ Return To The July/August 2001 Table Of Contents ]