Flare Design have been involved in what we certainly consider to be many of the most successful open speech implementations over the past five years. We count Westpac Australia, Inland Revenue, and Lloyds Bank as world class open speech deployments and equally some of the intelligence in older systems such as Telecom New Zealand has set the standards for future designs.
However, during this time we have watched from the sidelines as many poorly designed systems such are decommissioned. And the root cause is not what many people think. Recognition rates, while significantly improved since Nuance 9.0, have been sufficient for the last decade to make the technology work, but it is the poor designs that are the real reason for the technology to lack the success it promises.
While we don’t always manage to get all these things right, the top 10 most common “drop the ball” root cause issues in poor solutions include:
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- Lack of strategic direction ensuring stakeholder vision is captured and applied to the solution
- No business SME engagement, and even less up-skilling to extract IP
- One dimensional interpretation, not leveraging the recognised request and classifying into “multiple-slots”
- No agent buy-in and even less care when presenting call insights to the front line
- Poor integration with the future state operating model, instead focusing on current state routing only
- Poor KPI agreements
- No BAU hand-over
- No ongoing improvement processes
- Costly change
- Poor MIS
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These are not all “showstoppers” but will, at the very least, all negatively impact on the resulting business value. But the biggest risk is that the business, if not engaged, will place increasing pressure on the “owner” to turn the system, which they simply do not understand, off. On the flip side, if the agent is given full context about the callers needs, and the business team owning the system are provided new tools and flexibility to manage call demand and agent efficiency, then the opposite will be true. We’ve seen fantastic results and adoption at all of our clients that invest in a solution that puts the customer and your people at the centre of the design. That’s where we can help you.
We bring in real world open speech deployments, enabling us to highlight risks, mitigation strategies, and how to make the technology work for your business. Our goal is to work with the business stakeholders, and project team to ensure we translate the exact nature of how open speech must work for your business and customers. As with all our projects we also respect the knowledge and seek key input of frontline staff, understanding how they work, what they understood the concept to be, and how to best integrate it into their work pattern (and importantly their desktop and processes).
We focus on innovation and how this significant investment can not slot into your current state business but rather deliver a foundation for a shift to a more efficient future state. This is how the technology can really deliver the business need.
So, if you’re considering open speech, talk to us…