Are You Ready for the Great Millennial Migration?
1 Mar, 2009
By: Dave PellandWhat Your Service/ Speech Automation Says About You
Millennials, the Internet-bred, wireless-linked, wiki-savvy segment of the population born in the 1980s-90s, are redefining the market’s perception of customer service. As a result, companies are expected to provide automated options that are more in tune with the preferences of a generation raised on touch screens, keypads and synthesized voice.
Recent research by Convergys reveals the transformation in customer service now taking place:
• Use of automated channels such as e-mail and Web chat has doubled in the last four years, and will double again by 2010.
• Millennials are 43 percent more likely than previous generations to engage their preferred channels.
A separate new market study by the insurance industry and Microsoft supports Convergys’ findings on next-generation customer care. When asked what technologies companies should adopt to better serve customers. Millennials listed the following as “important”:
• Personal Web portals with full view of their accounts (86 percent)
• Web-based support (89 percent)
• Automated phone responses (69 percent)
• Live online chats with agents (76 percent)
• Instant messaging with agents (67 percent)
• Company blog to post concerns and questions (69 percent)
• Mobile alerts (59 percent).
Companies that have long embraced automation to reduce the cost of customer service might see these numbers as cause to rejoice – but they shouldn’t pop the champagne corks just yet. Millennials introduce new requirements far above the capabilities of yesteryear’s systems.
To support the Millennial migration, companies must understand that Millennials have high expectations for automation: rapid-fire service ensuring they are routed to the right place in nano-time; meaningful personalization shaped by business intelligence; and the range of freedom and choice made possible by multimodal interaction capabilities.
New developments in automation provide these capabilities through software-driven voice portals that enable a personalized, multimodal experience, moving the enterprise beyond the limited capabilities of traditional interactive voice response (IVR) systems. For the enterprise, the voice portal creates an efficient, cost-effective channel that addresses Millennials’ desires, while also creating the opportunity for increased overall customer satisfaction.
Analytics and Speech Technology: Routing to the Right Place the First Time
In old IVR systems, the burden of “getting to the right place” was placed on the caller. Customers drummed their fingers while listening to long menus. Mllennials have no patience with such do-it-yourself automation, and fortunately there are now better tools that route customers to the right place at the right time: driven by analytics.
The use of analytics with the latest voice portal speech technology at both the front end and back end helps companies better understand callers’ needs and requests, and how the company is addressing them.
The work begins with creating the right user interface. Prior to deployment of any automated solution, analytics can be used to determine the number of calls coming in and the callers’ needs. Typical criteria examined by analytics include:
• How many customers initiate contact because of billing problems?
• How many have technical support questions?
• Do those numbers change month to month, or based on the time of month?
Data drawn from close analysis of these and similar criteria help the designer create the optimum user interface.
On the back end, analytics ensures that the routing mechanism designed into the interface supports business goals and treats callers correctly. For example, analytics checks on secondary transfers and sees if the number of these transfers is reduced after a design change to confirm that more callers are getting to the right spot on the first attempt. Likewise, finding a thread of secondary transfers can often show a hotspot that requires further attention.
Speech technology is another important tool. For example, if the analytics show that customers are contacting the company for a wide variety of reasons, then the use of a statistical language model or SLM comes into play. This is the “How may I help you?” style of menus that allows callers to say whatever they want, letting the automated system determine their intent. This particular speech technology lets the company “flatten” a menu tree and provide a much quicker and more natural interface to callers. It also allows for more detailed disambiguation that determines the precise reason for the customer call. For example, does the customer want a copy of a bill or have a simple question about a bill? Precise routing and fewer secondary transfers gets the customer where he or she wants and needs to be, meeting the goal of quickly resolving questions and issues. These are “must do’s” for Millennials, who have been conditioned to expect rapid response and resolution times.
Real Personalized Experience
In the past, “personalized” meant greeting the customer by name and a few other gimmicks. What personalized means now is really customizing the user experience to optimize it for a particular customer – whether it is through the IVR, on the Web or via an agent. This means companies can take into account all the knowledge they have about callers and use that knowledge to make decisions on how to best interact with them. Two key components are needed to make this an efficient, easy- to-manage process: (1) a comprehensive, detailed data capture mechanism and (2) a decision-making component.
First, the company needs a full-fledged profile on everything known about every customer who calls or logs in for care – when they call, why they call, when they use the Web and why, what the company’s last interaction was with them, the last correspondence mailed to them, when their next payment is due, the status of their account, to name just a few critical details. The more information available, the more business intelligence-driven rules can be used to create a tailored, customized experience.
For years, companies have used IVR and Web applications that embed business rules in voice applications or in Web service calls. But this traditional approach typically restricts the business from easily accessing and modifying business rules. New technology provides greater ease and power to improve the interaction and ensure a topnotch experience. Decision-making technology provides polished graphical front ends, thus giving enhanced control over managing business logic. Along with analytics, this decisioning technology empowers the company to tweak and tailor business rules over time, based on actual customer behavior and preferences.
Multichannel Interactions for Multimodal Life and Work Styles
A key component to any long-term strategy is the inclusion of multichannel support for the customer. And, rather than introducing new complexity, a multimodal experience simplifies things for customers, allowing them to choose how to accomplish their task. Millennials favor the added control and flexibility of anytime, anywhere self-service.
The great communications advances of the past 20 years have created a generation of customers who are mobile, connected, and flexible – accustomed to fluid lifestyles and work habits. That means that companies must step up and provide multimodal interaction choices – IVR, Web, email, or voice – depending on the customer’s preference.
Another element of personalization is that multimodal applications allow the customer to respond through the interface most suitable for the specific task and the context of the interaction. Multiple approaches are available to provide multimodal capability. Two common approaches are: (1) synchronized and (2) one-at-a-time.
In a synchronized multimodal interaction, an application may offer voice as well as screen and keyboard as interfaces. The customer will usually favor the most effective interface for the task at hand. For example, the customer may prefer to make a voice request to avoid excessive typing, then click on a list or map on the screen instead of listening to long descriptions of the available options.
The one-at-a-time approach to multimodal interactions leverages multiple modalities without trying to apply them simultaneously. For example, a speech-enabled travel reservation application can offer to send a short message service (SMS) with an itinerary URL at the conclusion of the voice call. The user can then click on the URL in the SMS to access a Web page with the itinerary.
The context of the interaction may influence the choice of interfaces. The customer may be reluctant to make voice requests while in a crowded place, and thus typing may be an appreciated alternative. On the other hand, it is usually difficult to focus on a screen while walking. And while driving, the use of a keypad may be unlawful, making voice the only choice.
Analytics plays an important role in multimodal interfaces, too. Once a system is deployed, multichannel analytics provides the company with an enterprise-wide view of the customer experience and behavior patterns across all customer touch points, pinpointing opportunities for improvements. Customer touch points can range from following a customer’s initial call from the self-service application to an agent, to customer satisfaction reports – and then track repeat behavior within touch points. Metrics ensure that the system aligns with business objectives, and report both successes and failures to enable continuous improvement across the total customer experience.
The Insurity/Microsoft "Millennials in Insurance Survey 2008," conducted by Washington, D.C.-based KRC Research
