Transportation firms in every mode: airlines, bus companies, cruise lines, ferries, intercity rail operators and urban transit agencies are operating on thin margins in competitive and highly demand-variable markets. This environment forces them to watch every penny being spent while paying a close eye to customer loyalty.

One of the most common tools transportation companies are adopting is speech recognition i.e. speech rec. Speech rec provides swift service: essential for customers who need information and to make/change reservations ASAP that are often difficult to provide with DTMF IVR at much lower per-transaction costs than live agents. At the same time there are interactions such as quick schedule lookup and those involving entering credit card numbers that DTMF is more suitable for than speech.

Yet as with live agent-provided service, transportation firms must juggle between having enough automated speech rec and DTMF IVR self-service capacity to avoid customer-annoying queues and not to waste scarce capital and assets on idle resources. This especially goes for speech rec as it is more expensive and time-consuming to deploy than DTMF owing to its greater complexity.

Grant Shirk, director of Industry Solutions at Tellme Business Solutions at Microsoft (News - Alert) points out that the thin-margin and demand-variable transportation environment can make it difficult for operators to effectively manage their contact centers including self-service systems like speech rec. They create operational challenges including an often overpowering focus on cost management and automation, unpredictable and spiky traffic, all while trying to maintain a high-level of customer satisfaction for different kinds of customers : casual, business, and high-value frequent fliers.

“While the barriers to entry in the travel industry are high, switching costs from one provider to another in any market are very low for consumers, so there is a premium on attracting and keeping the most valuable travelers,” Shirk said.

The answer lies in hosted automated speech rec. Tellme’s (News - Alert) solution is highly scalable, enabling even the largest transportation operators to handle the biggest call spikes; it handles 10 billion speech requests every year. The hosted model is coupled with pay-as-you-go pricing that enables firms to carefully manage their costs.

The firm has rolled into the platform several technologies that deliver highly personalized experiences.  These products include a powerful personalization database that allows applications to store and manage key customization criteria to drive compelling user experiences. They also include segmentation-based call analytics to surface valuable performance insights about how individual segments interact with – and ultimately succeed in their tasks – within them.

Tellme’s solutions have enabled one unnamed airline’s customers to get to their status information 30 seconds faster, resulting in 60 percent swifter overall task completions. The carrier realized a 26 percent reduction in abandoned calls, and doubled its rate of fully automated tasks.

The Tellme application has boosted customer satisfaction. This is achieved when customers call in they do not have to ask as the systems recognizes the callers, their preferences and travel plans and delivers the information that is most relevant to them at the beginning of their calls.

“That airline’s unique ability to recognize returning customers and tailors the calling experience to their needs, which leaves callers delighted, differentiates their service from the competition and lowers demand on live agents,” Shirk said.