In case you aren’t familiar with Voxify, they are one of the pioneers in the use of speech-recognition-driven automated agents in contact centers. With customers like Hammacher Schlemmer in retail and Red Lion Hotels in hospitality, Voxify agents have really taken automation in the contact center to a different level. Since coming out with these speech-enabled agents Voxify has made regular updates to the product, so I was thinking that maybe their next move would be to add some sort of speech analytics or knowledge database-driven capability to their agents, but not this round. Instead, they surprised me by announcing two other things at SpeechTEK – allowing customers to deploy their solution on-premise, instead of or in addition to the hosted solution that they have been providing, and enabling contact center managers to change routing and scripting of self-service call flows dynamically.
Let’s look at their new deployment offering first. It seems that while much of the industry is turning towards hosting, Voxify is doing the reverse and adding a premise option. I could go on for a long time on the history of hosting in the self-service market - how the majority of vendors started by selling on-premise solutions, and then how a few of them started providing hosting for overflow and business continuity planning. But, that would take a long time. Let’s just say that in the early days of IVR hosting was rare. Although now it is mainstream, a year ago I would have perhaps thought “Isn’t this a little backward”, for a hosting vendor to add premise, and not the reverse, but its not. Why? Because just as I wrote in my white paper Split Decision: How Vendor Bias Affects the Complex Hosted vs. Premise IVR Business Case, Voxify isn’t forcing the customer to make trade-offs based on the type of deployment option they choose, they are instead giving them the best of both worlds.
So how does this work? Their On-Premise deployment approach takes the tack of leaving the speech resources in the contact center and the Automated Agents in the Voxify hosting network. Their On-Premise Overflow provides customers with redundancy, extra capacity and business continuity because the speech resources on the customer’s site are replicated in the Voxify hosting network.
So how is this different? The application doesn’t care where those automated agents are, and you shouldn’t either. That’s the point. You can provision your premise system to the average calls that you are taking, not for peak calls, have overflow ready on the hosted site, and the application or the telecom provider determines where the calls go by volume. This is the crux of the meaning of dynamic.
Speaking of dynamic, the other announcement Voxify made was about empowering the contact center manager to change the routing and scripting of the call flow dynamically based on things going on that hour or day. (By the way, I’m not sure that any contact center manager goes home feeling empowered at the end of the day, but I’m sure these things help them.) I’m not just talking about the ability for a contact center manager to reroute calls to different queues, but being able to change scripting on the fly without asking for Voxify or an IT guru to help.
They did this by creating a Call Steering Manager that allows contact center managers to work with different consoles to change call flow or routing on the fly, along with changes to the script for Automated Agents. This is a managed service where Voxify deploys, tunes, and supports the speech application, but that contact center managers can change quickly themselves. During my briefing with Voxify, an example that immediately came to my mind would be to make a change based on discovering that customers are calling in a lot based on a competitive situation. At that point a manager can insert a question for the caller, such as “Are you calling in response to a promotion”, and if the caller says yes, then have those calls routed to a particular group of agents. Or they can insert a second question, such as “what promotion did you hear about”, to solicit more information as to whether it is a competitor, and which one, or if the call is in response to an internal promotion. In any case, changes can be as simple as adding an announcement or as complex as soliciting information and routing to a new queue.
These new features were designed with the idea that scripts and call flows rarely are static, so why not make the application ready to change from the get go? With that idea in mind, Voxify developed the feature so that the manager could test the application live before deploying it, and they limited the complexity so that a manager could implement changes without breaking something (a big pet peeve of mine that I talked about in my ‘why don’t we test more’ blog.) They also made it so that the user could roll back to a previous version for whatever reason, such as needing to ask new questions of the caller for only a short period of time, etc.
One caveat is that the scripting change ability works for Voxify Automated Agents. Voxify integrates with other vendors contact center software, but certainly if a change needs to be made to a script that a live agent would use, it would be up to the contact center manager to use whatever software they were using with the live agent to institute those changes.