Genesys: Customers Like Self-Service

By DAVID SIMS
TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist

A recent study commissioned by Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc., an Alcatel company has revealed that "self-service customer interaction systems are quickly becoming a standard method of communication between organizations and customers," and not surprisingly, "consumers are demanding and expecting easy-to-use, sophisticated technology to expedite their customer service inquiries."

More than 200 North American customer service executives and 300 consumers participated in the self-service study on how contact centers are using self-service technologies to provide customer service.

Key findings from the study, along with anecdotal insight from both management and consumers, are available in the report, "Contact Center Realities: Industry Insights for Success with Self-Service."

"Self-service is a valuable tool for call center management," said Wes Hayden, CEO, Genesys which, coincidentally enough, sells just such self-service applications.

The study also found that 42 percent of organizations already have deployed speech recognition, or are developing their first application. 85 percent of consumers think speech recognition works satisfactorily or very well, and 65 percent prefer voice self-service to touchtone self-service.

Now that the Dual Tone Multi Frequency ("Press 1 for…") systems are going the way of VHS and 8-track tapes, "in the past three years, speech-recognition IVR has become increasingly effective," according to Chuck Raudonis of the Direct Marketing Association. "Accuracy rates have improved and the processing power needed to support the servers has increased, making complex applications possible."

Raudonis agrees that consumer acceptance is strong, saying "speech recognition the de facto standard of quality customer care. The average self-service rate for speech recognition programs is 50 percent and above -- impressive compared with the paltry 15 percent standard of DTMF."

The study found that 60 percent of executives say "meeting customer expectations" and "improving the customer experience" is a greater priority than reducing costs.

Responding executives rated "self-service" as the most important business priority, with most indicating that the greatest value of self-service is its ability to make an organization more accessible to the customer. Seventy-three percent of executives rated self-service a high or very high priority for their business.

Raudonis says a successful speech recognition application "should be built from the ground up, not simply as an existing DTMF application with the response mechanism converted from touch-tone to speech recognition."

One way to achieve this, he recommends, "is to listen to live representatives interacting with your customers; because they deal with these calls every day, their input can be invaluable. Using this information, you can then design the flow of your speech recognition program."

The study's methodology was not detailed in the press release.

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David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles by David Sims, please visit:

http://www.tmcnet.com/tmcnet/columnists/columnist.aspx?id=100005&nm=David%20Sims

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