The recession is fueling the adoption of hosted/managed IVR services, as companies are desperately seeking ways to reduce their call center and customer service operating costs.

With today’s IVR systems, companies can give customers a variety of self-service options. With their advanced speech recognition capabilities, these systems can carry out “natural dialogs” with customers and help them with basic transactions or information. For example, a bank customer can use an IVR to check account balances, make transfers and make payments. In this regard these systems help preserve precious and costly live agent resources for more complex or higher-value transactions.

 

Helping to spur adoption of hosted IVR services is the fact that they are faster, simpler and more affordable to deploy than ever before. A recent report from DMG Research predicts that sales of inbound hosted IVR solutions will see an average compound growth rate of about 13.4 percent over the next four years, while outbound IVRs will see an average growth rate of about 18.7 percent. Meanwhile, sales of on-premises IVR systems are expected to decline during this period.

 

“Sales of IVRs are growing rapidly based on the strength of new applications, rapid deployments and product innovation from a range of highly competitive hosted/managed service providers,” the report from DMG states. “Organizations of all types – companies large and small, governments, higher education, non-profits, etc. – that previously bypassed hosted/managed service IVR offerings are not only considering these offerings, but making commitments.”

“Self-service IVR solutions are important for enterprises in good times and become critical when budgets are tight, because they are highly effective in automating interactions that do not require the cognitive capabilities of live agents,” said Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting. “Many of the hosted/managed service IVR providers have come to market with inbound and outbound offerings that are highly responsive to the economic and technical challenges of their customers and this is speeding up the pace of adoption.”

VoltDelta is a leading provider of hosted call center solutions, including Web-based IVR systems. The company’s CrystalWAVE speech recognition technology takes a different approach from other vendors by running multiple speech technologies in parallel to achieve even higher accuracy. As such, VoltDelta’s (News - Alert) CrystalWAVE technology goes way beyond simple word or phrase spotting and can actually interpret meaning by analyzing the context in which those words or phrases are used.

“The use of multiple technologies in parallel allows for flexibility in that the recognition grammars are equally suited to different types of callers; those that give short/succinct responses as well as those that use more natural-language like speech,” a recently-released white paper from VoltDelta explains. “Within the same application different levels of speech complexity can be handled seamlessly, allowing for applications that are driven by need and not technology restrictions.”

“CrystalWAVE differs from other voice recognition techniques due in large part to the variety of data sources that are considered to more accurately recognize human speech in real time,” the white paper adds. “Grammars can be of any size, from thousands of data entries to the hundreds of millions of records found in telephone directories. This data also provides CrystalWAVE with a sense of context. Recognition results can be immediately refined through a speech process known as robust parsing. This technique works to verify results that appear consistent with the data set or discounting those that fall out of logical parameters.”

With its advanced algorithms, VoltDelta’s CrystalWAVE is able to “ignore” (i.e. filter out) utterances that aren’t actually words – such as the “ums” and “uhs” that so frequently adorn caller responses. The system achieves this in part by segmenting words and phrases into categories: those which are in the system’s vocabulary which it is “certain” of; those which are in its vocabulary which it is “marginally certain” of; and words and phrases which are not in the system’s vocabulary at all.

 

In the event the system encounters a word or phrase it is only “marginally certain” of, it automatically triggers the generation of smaller, focused grammars, or WAVE (News - Alert)-LETS, and in effect takes a “second look” at the utterances and then narrows the recognition task to the words most likely spoken. Through this approach, difficult/complex “problems” are reduced and made simpler. The use of this WAVE-LET technology is seamless and automatically applied when required.

The result is a much higher degree of speech recognition accuracy:

“Tests run on over 30,000 actual calls comparing CrystalWAVE performance to standard directed dialog and natural language voice recognition displays compelling advantages,” the white paper states. “Results revealed accuracy improvements of 10 percent when comparing either traditional phrase-based grammars or SLM-based natural language recognition with CrystalWAVE. More uniquely, CrystalWAVE reduced the false presentation rate by 5 percent. False presentation rate is used to highlight context sensitive benefits such as not presenting the caller with a phrase that might easily be misunderstood as correct.”

To download a free copy of the white paper and learn more about VoltDelta’s CrystalWAVE speech recognition technology, click here.