By Gary Flood

“I didn’t understand that—please say it again.” All too often this is the negative experience consumers have with interactive voice recognition (IVR) and speech recognition software. The technology seems very fragile, easy to confuse and often plain irritating.

Finding your voice
That all may be changing as speech recognition gets more robust and is being used increasingly by organizations as a way to interact with the customer.

A recent survey of use of speech, for instance, identified applications in travel and transport, public sector, utilities and retail banking—ranging from checking arrival times, location of council services, meter readings or finding the nearest automatic teller machine. While many companies see online as the best first call for customer self-service support, there does seem to be a growing niche for speech as an adjunct to call center functionality. So is it time to revise not just the consumer perception of speech but also that of the sceptical CIO?

CIO UK spoke to four organizations regarding their successful implementations of a speech channel: utility Bournemouth & West Hampshire Water, budget hotel chain Travelodge, travel company First Choice and Bss, an outsourced contact center for the public sector.

Mike Sylvester is IT project manager at Bournemouth Water, which has implemented a voice recognition payments system for its 420,000 users. He told CIO UK how the company had been able to accept payment cards for a few years, but “due to the potential impact on our call center we had not publicized this service.” Speech recognition, he says, has been the main way to solve the problem as the automated system avoids extra call traffic to the organization’s call center advisors. “We see this as key to improving customer service, making the service available 24-hours and in the long term [we will] increase speed of payment and lower bad debt issues through offering this option.”

Sylvester sees scope for functionality like customer account balance checks, direct debit sign-up and general call routing as other future uses of speech.

Travelodge describes itself as the U.K.’s number one budget hotel chain with nearly 300 hotels nationwide. It too has turned to this form of customer interaction: “Speech self-service was introduced for a number of reasons,” says Shona Fraser, its director of revenue and reservations.

“The principal one was to extend our voice reservations service to cover a 24-hour period, therefore allowing us to reach a wider market without increasing the cost of a room. The huge growth in our estate over the past three years has resulted in a growth in reservations. But rather than increase costs and staffing within our existing call centers, using the Web as a platform the speech self-service technology lets us capture business in a low-cost way,” she says. “This fits well with our brand strategy to champion low cost rates and enable more people to stay in hotels, more of the time.”