Daniel O'Sullivan

During production trials from March 8, 2012 through March 16, 2012 adaptive technology improved the success rate of automated calls at a client site by 1 percent.

The client, an unnamed IVR hosting center that supports thousands of ports and dozens of voice applications, segregated out select groups of adaptive and non-adaptive ports for exact performance measurements. The adaptive ports were using Interactive Digital’s Adaptive Audio (www.interactive-digital.com) software.

As Figure 1 below shows, the call center received a total of 37601 calls on the non-adaptive ports during this period while 37811 were received on the adaptive ones. Of those calls, respectively 10110 and 10545 were considered by the client to be successful. To meet the criteria for success, a caller had to receive information (bank balance, airline flight information, medical claim details etc.) and then either...

The hallmarks of a great self-service voice application are not a whole lot different from that of a great CSR. After all, they serve (or are supposed to serve) the same purpose; your customers need for service and information via telephone. In fact, from the caller’s perspective, engaging with an IVR application is similar to engaging with another human. Callers are, generally speaking, fair and reasonable individuals that are willing to work with a CSR or technology as long as that engagement seems to be working for them.

Figure 1 shows how an “engagement threshold” exists for the caller when they use an IVR application the first few times. Notice that, though it may be slightly different for Speech and DTMF, there is a significant threshold after 2 - 3 successful interactions by the caller. This critical period is when callers ask themselves whether this automated process will work for them so they don’t have to wait for a CSR, or whether they are wasting their time when...

More than ever in the past, today’s telephony based voice applications must address large and very diverse calling populations. This audience uses a wide variety of personal, mobile and landline based devices in various modes to access information over the phone.

• At the end of 2011, there were 6 billion mobile subscriptions, according to the International Telecommunication Union.

• Mobile subscriptions outnumber fixed lines 5:1 (more so in developing nations)

• According to the US Census Bureau, the hearing loss population in the US has grown to over 31.5 million

• Linguists estimate that half of the world’s population is bilingual and there are about 5,000-6,000 different languages spoken in the world today.

• People of a particular culture or regional dialect may be comfortable with long pauses at the conclusion of a sentence, while people of another may find this demonstrates disinterest, lack of attentiveness and even disrespect.

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Apple, Ally Bank, Amazon and Zappos. What do all of these companies have in common?

Besides great products, innovative marketing strategies and extensive product eco-systems, they all deliver on one more essential ingredient: Exceptional Customer Service.

Take Apple for instance. I brought my MacBook into the Genius Bar at my local Apple Store a few months ago. Two of the four little feet that keep the MacBook off the desk fell off. Despite the fact that the machine was more than 3 years old and that I did not have an Apple Care service plan, they still took the machine in the back and glued on four new ones for me. And while I had to make an appointment for this, but how about that there’s even such a thing as a Genius Bar in a retail store to accommodate me in the first place?

I've had many similar first rate customer experiences at Amazon, Best Buy and even some small retailers I have done business with through eBay. Responsive email and chat support, free...