Exploring Phone Application Systems for Superior Customer Service
1 May, 2007
By: Michael CodiniIn today’s business environment, customers expect superior customer service, whether it’s through the telephone, on the Web or in person. While the Web has become a popular interaction channel for customers, a new challenge for contact center professionals is to leverage both the phone and the Web channels in a consistent and cost-effective manner. Voice self-service service systems, also referred to as phone application systems, should allow callers to interact intuitively, quickly and flexibly with a company and its information systems, just as they can with Web applications. In general, these phone application systems need to a) support a convenient, personalized dialog, b) intelligently integrate back-end information into the information flow, and c) enable the detailed analysis of the caller behavior to optimize the system for improved customer interaction.
With the rapid adoption of new industry-standard VoiceXML IVRs, IT executives and telephony project managers for phone application systems have chosen a traditional method of developing and deploying these applications, by writing java code or leveraging tools to generate JSPs for the application. This method is very labor intensive, and maintenance of the application, particularly if it’s any sort of complex application, becomes very expensive. In fact, many companies are hesitant to change the application for fear of destabilization.
In addition, the fact that it is very difficult to deploy and maintain anything other than a basic phone application today prevents many companies from implementing modern, personalized systems that are convenient to use and reflect the same sort of positive experience as a Web channel. Clearly, there’s something wrong with voice systems today, given the popularity of Paul English’s Web site, gethuman.com, which provides the keystrokes to talk to a call center agent directly, and as demonstrated by Citibank’s “talk to a human” television advertising campaign.
Today, VoiceObjects is advocating a new approach that reflects a state-of-the-art multi-tiered model that is used by top application developers and providers, whether they are enterprise or on-demand applications. The use of a multi-tier, Web services-based model, where the middle tier is a phone application server, allows companies to address the issues of complexity and cost with current phone application systems.
A phone application server enables significantly reduced complexity in application deployment and maintenance. It enables modern, personalized phone application systems by making it easy for developers to access and update data from CRM and ERP systems. By allowing companies to quickly analyze the prompts, dialogs and caller behavior to optimize the system, callers will enjoy an easy-to-use and effective customer experience.
VoiceObjects Server is an example of a phone application server, which is software that enables carrier-grade deployment and management of over-the-phone self-service applications. All phone application servers have the following four capabilities:
• The ability to dynamically generate VoiceXML to create personalized dialogs with each caller at call-time, using information in an organization’s CRM or other databases. The resulting caller-specific conversations provide opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell, as well as higher rates of customer satisfaction and service adoption.
• An application execution environment that supports remote management and monitoring of multimodal applications, online application maintenance for instant changes or roll-backs, and guaranteed high availability.
• Web services support for easy integration between an organization’s phone-based self-service assets and its CRM, ERP and other IT assets in service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments, drastically reducing development time and cost.
• Support for multimodal phone applications that may include voice, video, graphics and text interfaces, allowing user-friendly, interactive applications that are unmatched in the phone-based self-service industry.
In summary, phone application servers allow companies to do three key things: reduce the complexity of building customer-friendly phone applications, easily integrate with existing corporate databases and optimize the applications using analytics tools to drill-down and identify problem areas of the system.
Today, customers such as Deutsche Telekom (T-Com) are delivering personalized phone application systems that intelligently route customer calls to appropriate call center agents and provide other customer service functions. Currently, T-Com’s voice portal serves up to 200,000 calls per day, and efforts are already underway to expand the system to serve as many as 1,500 concurrent calls and as many as 300,000 calls per day. The VoiceObjects-powered system has reduced costly errant calls by 56 percent, and T-Com’s use of VoiceObjects’ Analyzer to improve call flows has increased customer satisfaction by 50 percent.
