-->

How Conversational Self-Service Improves the Contact Center Experience (Video)

Learn more about customer self-service at the next SpeechTEK conference.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Quinn Agen: With conversational interfaces, as I mentioned previously, there's absolutely no predetermined flow, you can jump from any self-service or any dialogues, step to another dialogue, step at any moment in time. As I mentioned again previously, the key there is the dynamic, unstructured content. If you can't understand what someone is referring to indirectly, you're not going to make it very far in the conversation.

This session is really supposed to be on the transformative power of conversational, so I wanted to set the stage at the start in terms of how we define conversational and what that means for the customer experience.

Today, we have 24 production conversational voice portals in banks, telcos, and insurance companies in 11 different countries. Here we have some stats from a couple of our customers, Vodafone and then Piraeus Bank and Alpha Bank, obviously financial institutions. (For those of you who don't know Vodafone, it is a telecom operator.) In terms of business benefits in the call center, we increased the customer satisfaction in the IVR because customers can get serviced quicker, get to the self-service on the first try and also get to the correct agent on the first try.

Some statistics that I've seen in talking to different customers, I would say that on average, misroutes in a speech-enabled or DTMF IVR account for around 10-15% of call volume. That's obviously a poor user experience when you have to talk to three different agents to actually get serviced. Self-service usage goes up because we make the self-service experience easier, we're not telling them what to say they just speak what they want. Call capacity goes up because we are being able to manage more calls in quicker time.

Normally, when we implement our conversational platform, we can even decrease the total port demand for a specific customer. For a lot of our customers who were on DTMF or even speech-enabled DTMF with 1,000 ports, we were able to get them down to 800 and 900 ports because it's a more lean and mean machine.

On the Decrease side, return callers, because we're getting callers to the proper agents faster, we're getting them self-serviced faster. I mentioned the internal transfers, and then of course the average handling time. The decrease in average handling time accounts not only on the IVR side because you've condensed the tree and they don't have to listen to 100 menu options.

Also on the agent side because we do have a voice biometric solution which can do the authentication in the IVR, but additionally if you don't have voice biometrics we can still have the virtual assistant do the authentication logic and save that 30-45 seconds of agent talk time which is not only good for the customer because they have to talk to the agent in less time, but good for the cost operations for our customers.

SpeechTek Covers
Free
for qualified subscribers
Subscribe Now Current Issue Past Issues
Related Articles

Best Practices for Active Listening in ASR (Video)

SpeakEasy AI CEO Frank Schneider offers essential tips on using AI and active listening to enhance automatic speech recognition in this clip from SpeechTEK 2018.

How Intelligent Agents Leverage NLU, Intents, and Entities (Video)

Ulster University Professor Michael McTear discusses how contemporary natural language-based intelligent agents use intents and entities rather than traditional parse trees in this clip from SpeechTEK 2018.

Guidelines for Designing Chatbots (Video)

Ulster University Professor Michael McTear identifies key resources for chatbot design best practices as well as tools and frameworks for building voice-user interfaces in this clip from SpeechTEK 2018.

How Users Interact with Different Types of Intelligent Agents (Video)

Ulster University Professor Michael McTear discusses how interactions differ with different intelligent agents, from one-shot dialogue to system-directed dialogue and mixed-initiative in this clip from his presentation at SpeechTech 2018.

The Three Types of Intelligent Agents (Video)

Ulster University Professor Michael McTear breaks down the intelligent agent field in terms of type, technology, and functionality in this clip from SpeechTEK 2018.

Video: The Downside of Directed Dialogue NLU

Omilia's Nikos Kolivas discusses the value of context and memory in delivering human-like interactions in self-service contact centers in this clip from SpeechTEK 2018.

How Machine Learning and AI Can Enhance Virtual Agent Training (Video)

USAA's Brett Knight discusses how USAA has used machine learning and AI in virtual agent training at the enterpise level in this clip from SpeechTEK 2018.

Why Customers Prefer Conversational Self-Service (Video)

Omilia's Quinn Agen discusses the advantages of taking a conversational approach in automated contact center customer care in this clip from SpeechTEK 2018.

How to Assemble a Conversational Development Team for Virtual Agents (Video)

USAA's Brett Knight describes all the players enterprises should assemble when planning conversational development for virtual agents in this clip from SpeechTEK 2018.

Video: How to Train Virtual Agents to Recognize Customer Needs

USAA's Brett Knight explains how to train virtual agents to anticipate customer needs more effectively in this clip from SpeechTEK 2018.

Video: Rules-Based Chatbot Design, Part 2: Visual Representation and Support

Aspect's Andreas Volmer discusses the value of visually representing conversational flow logic in chatbot design, and explores the advantages of a language-based approach over a statistically based approach in this clip from SpeechTEK 2018.

Video: How Amazon Connect Leverages AI in the Contact Center

Amazon Connect General Manager Pasquale DeMaio demos Amazon Connect AI-driven Lex chatbot in this clip from his keynote at SpeechTEK 2018.

Video: How Do You Build Engaging Contact Center Experiences?

AWS Head of Product, Language Tech Vikram Anzabhagan outlines 4 essential strategies for leveraging technology to make contact center interactions more personal, conversational, agile, and engaging in this clip from his SpeechTEK 2018 keynote.

Video: How Hardware Advances Have Transformed NLP

O'Reilly Media's Paco Nathan discusses the explosive growth in CPUs and GPUs that have opened new vistas for natural-language processing applications and rendered old approaches obsolete in this clip from his SpeechTEK 2018 keynote.

Video: What Can NLP Do for Your Converted Text?

Paco Nathan of O'Reilly Media's R & D Group discusses the benefits of natural-language processing (NLP) when working with text converted from video in this clip from his SpeechTEK 2018 keynote.

Video: How to Improve UX and User Rating for Your Alexa Skill

Witlingo Product Manager Navya Nayaki Yelloji discusses the successful product development and QA strategy Witlingo created for its Motley Fool Alexa Skill in this presentation from SpeechTEK 2018.

Video: Are Chatbots Here to Stay?

You can hardly visit a company website without a chatbot popping up to offer you help these days. But these days, chatbots are helping with everything from mental health to identifying possible online predators. Is this trend here to stay? We asked Michael McTear, Allyson Boudousquie, Debra Cancro, and Crispin Reedy at SpeechTEK 2018.