Who doesn’t remember the first time he or she interacted with a speech recognition engine? Sure, it felt a bit odd to be speaking to a computer, but it also felt so progressive and futuristic. As an end user of the technology, it was exciting.
As a contact center manager or CTO, it was a tad depressing. It was a technology so far out of the reach of your organization for a number of reasons: cost, implementation time, a lack of IT personnel to plan and administer it and the imagined headaches of troubleshooting it.
There is a reason why only large financial services organizations and airlines had speech self-service technologies: they were the only ones that could afford it. Even with the volume of calls that these organizations moved, the ROI still took a long time. Forget even the expense and time of purchasing and implementing earlier iterations of speech. Just determining your organizations needs in terms of call-routing and self-service sounded like a headache waiting for a place to happen. Speech is not touch-tone IVR and can’t be treated the same way (and who ever really got the knack of effectively building touch-tone IVR menu trees in the first place?)
Today’s hosted speech solutions are bear little resemblance to the massive-scale projects of five to 10 years ago, except in their enviable end goal: to allow customers to use the most natural of interfaces — their human voice — to take care of their own needs and keep your expensive live agents free to handle complex inquiries which is, after all, what you pay them for.
So now that cost and implementation are no longer a barrier keeping you from seeking speech for your call center, you might need to sit down and make a list to convince yourself (or…