3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

It might seem like an oxymoron, but the prevalence of older technology in use today is actually an opportunity waiting.

That’s the thinking behind new research that took a look at call handling applications used to connect callers, currently in use in a lot of call centers.

The study was conducted by Walt Tetschner, president of Tern Systems (News - Alert) Consulting and the publisher of industry journal Automatic Speech Recognition News. Tetschner analyzed more than 2,600 large businesses in the U.S., representing more than 10 major industries.

The study was summarized by parlance Corp., and uncovered some noteworthy nuggets. For example:

• The majority of businesses in the U.S. are using 1980’s era push button auto attendants to connect 2015 callers. “The new study found that DTMF Directed Dialog auto attendants (‘Press 1 to reach sales. Press 2 to reach technical support. Press 3 to reach…’) were utilized by the majority of businesses sampled, leading both Live Answer as well as newer and more caller-friendly call handling solutions, such as Speech Recognition Natural Language,” Parlance said.

• Adoption of the latest call-handling technologies will make rapid gains on older push-button technologies over the next 5 years, and organizations making the change earlier than others will have the competitive edge. “According to the research, the caller experience will become an increasingly important component of customer satisfaction programs,” Parlance noted, “leading to increased usage of more caller-friendly technologies to connect callers.”

“Frankly, the results of Walt’s study took a lot of us by surprise,” says Mark Bedard, Director of Marketing at Parlance Corporation and co-author of the new paper. “We knew that the caller experience was still lagging behind other customer satisfaction components at large organizations, but the problem is much more widespread than anticipated. The silver lining is that this information can help forward-thinking businesses get an easy customer satisfaction win if they examine their call handling practices and begin looking at things from the caller’s perspective.”

A complete whitepaper on the study can be downloaded for free HERE.