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Speech Interaction Brings the Realism to Contact Center Training That Can Reduce Turnover, Improve Customer Satisfaction and Increase Revenue
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StarPerformer is a speech-interactive “flight simulator” that enables contact center employees to acquire the experience they need to be successful without placing current or prospective relationships at risk.
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Atlanta, GA (6/23/2008) - What do most contact centers representatives get a chance to do that airlines pilots don't? Practice on their customers and prospects, of course.
Role-playing has almost always been a component of contact center training. However, unlike the simulators used by airlines, the inefficiencies and cost of the one-on-one methodology has forced contact centers to cut corners and rely substantially on on-the-job training as a way for frontline employees to acquire and hone critical skills. The risk of exposing current or prospective customers to relatively inexperienced representatives is one that, until now, many companies had to take. It has translated into excessively high employee turnover, low customer satisfaction scores, and delayed or lost revenue opportunities.
A combination of speech recognition, text-to-speech, and dynamic scripting technologies enables frontline sales, support, and service representatives to experience the interaction and the environment of inbound and outbound operations that use speech, email, and/or chat to bridge relationships.
Trainees, cross-trains, or even veterans who need to brush up on their skills, are provided an immersive, real-life experience where they role-play with what is perceived as a live prospect or customer and at the same time interact with rapidly created simulacrums of the actual desktop applications. All of this takes place in a risk-free and controlled environment.
Executing on a PC, StarPerformer can play the role of coach and customer( or prospect). As a coach, it can listen to what the user is saying and observe his selections and keystrokes. Then, it can compose speech on the fly to support or critique those actions or statements, suggest a best practices strategy, or even take control of the mouse and keyboard to demonstrate the proper procedure.
Playing the role of a customer or prospect, StarPerformer can respond to the user's utterance of key words or phrases with an intelligent, highly contextual response. For example, any response (e.g. I ain't gonna pay you no-way.) can be driven by the users' own statements (e.g. Do you want to pay by check or credit card?), customer record demographics (the delinquent amount determines whether or not StarPerformer will agree only to a partial payment) or statistically relevant possibilities (e.g. I'm sorry. There is no one home right now. Please leave...).
At the same as it plays these roles, StarPerformer tracks, scores, records and reports agent performance and can even tabulate the analytics used in live operations.
Adding to the realism is the users ability to say and do things out of any preconceived order, fully replicating the real dynamics of frontline interactions. Moreover, the ability to use live database records to drive those interactions eliminates the time and effort to craft demographics by hand and produces a greater incidence and variety of credible, real-world scenarios.
According to Rick Horwitz, Speech Interactive CEO and, credible, performance oriented role-playing works. "Just ask any airline pilot who has just walked out of a flight simulator. Until the Star series of simulators, there wasn't a training methodology that responded to the unique needs of contact centers," said Horwitz. "Classroom training was thought of as a knowledge transfer. However, in this industry, like the airlines, an experience transfer is equally if not more important. Unfortunately, most agents today still acquire their experience through OJT. Practicing on customers and prospects with competitors only a click away is a risky, Darwinian approach to building an effective frontline workforce."
"Speech Interactive's automated solution provides the opportunity for reps to acquire the experience they need to perform near established standards and be more successful from day one. A Purdue University study had shown that stress is the number one factor in agent turnover. Having the skills and confidence to succeed provides the potential to reduce attrition and, as a Georgia Tech Dupree College of Management study has shown, that our StarPerformer technology can reduce talk time by 13 percent to 15 percent; and increase customer satisfaction by 8 percent. That's real savings and real revenue. It is StarPerformer that now makes the role-playing process cost-effective and provides the potential for an exceptional ROI on training".
Response from customers has been positive. "We always believed that simulation would be the way to flatten the learning curve," stated the director of a large collections firm."?But, it was the ability for us to rapidly develop fairly sophisticated content and create a credible and realistic environment for our new-hires and cross-trains that compelled us to choose StarPerformer over others. Moreover, it is the remedial solution for many, if not most, of the problems identified by back-end analytics."
Highly customizable for the end-user development of other speech-enabled applications, StarPerformer has been used to quickly prototype self-service IVR solutions, intelligent personal assistants and an intelligent Customer Interaction Manager to help manage the communication with the customer and the underlying CRM system.
About Speech Interactive
Based in Atlanta, Speech Interactive has been developing and delivering cost-effective contact center solutions focused on agent effectiveness for more than 20 years, including the industry's first speech interactive training simulator, the StarTrainer. Today, the company is dedicated to building on that experience to deliver new levels of realism and functionality for contact centers and other markets.
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For more information contact:
Richard Horwitz, president & CEO
Phone: (678) 749-7423
Email: rickh@advertech-ltd.com
Speech Interactive, LLC
4780 Ashford Dunwoody Road, Suite 613
Atlanta, GA 30338
For additional information please visit our Web site at www.astarperformer.com.
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Advertech, Ltd.
Editorial Contact:
Richard Horwitz
678-749-7423
rickh@advertech-ltd.com
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