|
October 19, 2006
Speech-Enabled Call Management for Higher Education
Imagine a world where you can reach anyone on campus with just one phone number, or where your operators are available to answer every important call. Imagine enabling your students, faculty and staff to reach one another without having to search a printed list or call the receptionist. Now imagine reducing your telecommunications costs by eliminating the need to maintain and publish a lengthy directory or lease costly DID numbers.
Like many organizations today striving to deliver prompt customer service and increased accessibility on extremely lean budgets, higher education institutions face similar challenges that can require significant investment and planning to overcome. Many colleges and universities are seeking innovative ways to streamline communications, improve service and reduce costs.
Deploying speech applications can play an integral role in the telecommunications strategy for institutions where state-of-the-art facilities, services and technology are key to maintaining the school�s reputation. As managing communications between an ever-changing population of students, faculty and staff can appear daunting to administrators, implementing speech technology that is easy use and can provide immediate access to important information will assuredly earn high marks among users.
Speech-Enabled Call Management at Work
Typical colleges and universities serve thousands of students, faculties and staff, and maintaining DID lines and a published directory for each name can be an inefficient and costly task. Student populations often rely heavily on operators to route their calls, as do the highly mobile faculty and support staff, who need to communicate with many other locations throughout the college campus. Operators also regularly deal with time-consuming calls to the college�s main number from the local community.
Speech-enabled call management or �auto attendant� technology allows people to access one another by simply stating their name or department, without having to remember their extension, search a directory, or use a live operator for assistance. Callers are able to access information quickly because they are routed within seconds to the appropriate destination. Because speech-enabled auto attendant can help manage the daily influx of internal calls, receptionists and live operators become available to address more important requests. In addition, speech-enabled auto attendant applications can provide 24/7/365 access to �information on demand,� such as class schedules, emergency notifications and events around campus.
Speech performance and user-friendliness are common concerns for higher-education institutions with a diverse student population. Administrators should know that many speech-enabled call management systems today are equipped with natural language processing capabilities so that callers can speak as they would in a normal conversation when making requests. By utilizing advanced call routing techniques, these systems can provide unique greetings for internal and external callers, ensuring that students, faculty and the community are prompted to use the system to the maximum benefit. Systems can be customized for different academic environments and can recognize titles such as �Doctor� or �Professor, or aliases for department names. Due to advanced phonetics research in recent years, speech-enabled call management systems have been known to perform well in multicultural environments like higher-ed where accents and ethnic names can create challenges. Systems today often support various languages so that students, faculty and staff will have an easy time interacting with the system.
Selecting a Speech-Driven Solution
When planning for and selecting a speech-driven call management solution, higher-ed institutions need to do their homework. It is important that the system meet the school�s current and future communications needs and be compatible with its existing network infrastructure. Colleges should evaluate high-quality, well-built systems designed with scalability in mind. It is important to consider solutions from leading vendors who can provide pre-sale and post-implementation support.
As attitudes regarding speech technology continue to shift, administrators should consider integrating speech into their overall telecommunications plan. Colleges and universities must be early adopters of this technology in order realize all of the operational benefits it can provide.
This article was written by Amy Thomas, Active Voice, LLC. Please visit www.activevoice.com for more information.
(source: http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/-speech-enabled-call-management-higher-education-/2006/10/19/1999685.htm)
|
|
Internet Telephony Magazine
Click here to read latest issue
CUSTOMER 
Cloud Computing Magazine
Click here to read latest issue
IoT EVOLUTION MAGAZINE
