Just a short update on VoxIQ. Seeing as my August 19th blog title was “VoxIQ Enhances Next Generation Speech Recognition in the Contact Center and Beyond”, I figured I would have to give an update and say that VoxIQ enhances itself this time. True. VoxIQ and Loquendo announced this week that VoxIQ is using Loquendo’s Automated Speech Recognizer (Loquendo ASR) through Loquendo’s VoxNauta VoiceXML and CCXML platform to facilitate improvement in real-time call flow between agents and customers.
However, VoxIQ is also using Loquendo’s ASR and text-to-speech to allow intelligent ‘conversational self-service’ applications. This is something I have longed to see for awhile. Along the lines of the “how may I help you” applications the industry has slowly introduced, VoxIQ enables a company to start the self-service application out with an open ended question, and then default keywords in the caller’s response trigger directing the caller down one of the application legs. Let’s use insurance as an example. A call comes into an insurance company, the caller is prompted with “How may I help you”, and they say “I’m interested in getting quotes about car insurance”. Now this is where it gets good - the system then does something really cool, it prompts the caller with another somewhat open ended question, such as “tell me about your car”. Big deal you say, but the system isn’t asking particular questions, such as “What model is your car”. It’s asking for a general description so that it can glean as much information as possible without asking lots of questions. It then uses multiple pieces of information from the caller’s response to populate the appropriate boxes in the form that an agent would use. The only questions it will then ask are the ones necessary to complete those boxes not filled by the customer’s earlier description about their car.
When you have the self-service application do more of the up front heavy lifting for the contact center agent, serious savings can occur. Couple this with VoxIQ’s application being used as an adjunct to calls that the agents get, helping them input information into their screens, and you can save quite a bit of time on each call. VoxIQ sent me some calculations on cost savings in a 300 seat contact center, which they had vetted by an independent firm Murray International in the UK, which showed that in a 300 seat call center, operating 24/7, productivity will be improved by approximately 15%, representing a saving (if that is what is required) of $4m.
I’d be happy to share that information with anyone interested. Just drop me a note.