Industry Overview

Overview
One of the big issues that large organisations are challenged with is how to achieve operational efficiency without losing the trust of those they are supposed to serve – the public. They are further challenged by the need to remain accessible and provide the right level of service whilst being competitive and operating within demanding budgets. For the public-facing bodies these are often critical areas and often come to bear where the customer most often meets the enterprise – over the phone.

Voice communication is still the single biggest channel for providing almost any service and so naturally anything that can improve the caller’s experience whilst being efficient has to be worthy of investment. Equally anything that can ease the strain on public services, particularly emergency services, is generally perceived to be for the benefit of all.

The problem
There is a common perception that speech applications – and the infrastructure needed to run them – hugely expensive and complex. This in an outdated view, but one that is not helped by the existence of many old technology systems, which are now showing their age. Speech applications, and the supporting technology have developed hugely in recent years and the tools to build and manage them and the servers that run them have all become much less expensive today and also far more standardised and reliable.

So why are so many call centres a nightmare to experience? Take a look at www.gethuman.com if you don’t believe its an issue. Many organisations are becoming seen as ‘distant’ and ‘uncaring’, having removed much of the human factor from services that have, traditionally, been more face-to-face and which have in part been replaced by automated systems that were often badly designed.

With large organisations having more services to enable and a growing public service portfolio that has to be served, across longer hours of business or even 24x7, this issue of being able to make services more accessible is one that has to be constantly addressed.

However, many existing network based contact systems are “trapped” into maintaining semi-automated processes that are in use today, where the task of building up the customer relationship to a satisfactory level is inhibited by relatively low-level communications infrastructure that can appear as an immoveable object. Most interactive voice platforms have simply not kept up with developments in the CRM world and, as a result, data access and sharing and relationship knowledge held in databases is not accessible during communication with customers unless a live agent is involved to manage that process. Most public organisations also fail to achieve real hands on management of the telephony interface themselves – passing this job to outside specialists. The result is that they find it extremely difficult to move forward in any direction. Even changing a simple voice prompt can be a 10 week job for some of today’s major public-facing institutions and given the available technology this seems almost unbelievably slow. To avoid the problem, some institutions have outsourced voice services to service providers to get quicker results – but often at quite a price and with a loss of control.

The way forward
Today voice services can be built separate from the infrastructure that they run on – and can remain abstracted from the physical infrastructure, meaning that voice based services can be altered at will without the dread horror of system reconfiguration or downtime. All this can be done on a desktop. Services can also be built using tools in a fraction of the time it used to take – so for example a new service can be built and tried out in a matter of days rather than months and can be redesigned many times until it works just the way it should.

The ability to dynamically change the client interaction and present pertinent information ‘on the fly’ is also something that’s easily achievable today. And many services can be quickly constructed from base software components can be reused at will. In fact the speech application world is no longer the sole domain of technical specialists – any more so than the web is today. Advanced solutions can be designed to be run directly by the organisations that use them. This means that callers can experience up to date messages and get to their intended destination quicker – and also help themselves to an ever increasing degree. Even making a difference in Agent based call volumes of just 5% can have a dramatic effect.

Keeping the customer
As the public has become more educated about the availability and choices open to them (web and other media education and information channels have changed all this in the last decade) so their expectations have risen. Tolerance of poor voice based services and CRM in general is now very low in the commercial world - banks and financial institutes are increasingly prone to seeing customers voting with their feet. This may not be the case with public services as the choices may be limited but callers still make their own judgements and that can lead to “bad Press”.

By personalising communication with a caller, in almost any way, the quality of service can be improved. The way in which this can be achieved is by adoption of better quality speech solutions that open up a number of valuable processes to voice self-service.

Simple communication enhancements can include:

• Service analytics (understanding what services are being accessed by whom and when)
• Call routing and better matching of callers to the right service
• Service tuning (real time correction of failed or misused call paths)
• Customer profiling and access back to clients via CLI (caller identification)
• Multi-channel access (web, mobile, fixed line) and programmed access
• Personalisation (fast track services and personal preference options)
• Self service, customer preferences and customer profiling (remembering their preferences)
• Self-profiling (client declared interests)

These are all highly significant in improving the relationship with the caller. In addition, the use of advanced tools to incorporate these features is an important starting point. A good service-building environment which is operated and controlled by public organisations themselves with some external help, is a good way to get closer to the public so that branding and uniqueness of service can be protected and improved.

Vicorp xPress speech solutions
xPress™ addresses the issues of intelligently managing a client and providing pertinent information in any format at the right time and place, enabling organisations to build a relationship whose qualities are experienced each time a client makes contact.

Vicorp deliver an end-to-end solution that enables organisations to address their voice services in a complete manner. Vicorp also works with a number of partners across the globe to deliver the same level of quality worldwide.
Vicorp uses its own highly advanced development tools and platforms to deliver voice services and solutions: its xMP product suite is the leading independent Service Creation environment available in the market.

Vicorp provides all the tools and a runtime framework for assembling, deploying, delivering and managing dynamic communication services. Single and multi-channel application environments are available that strongly support Service Creation, reuse, development and extension by non-technical people. Vicorp also builds sample services, prototypes, proof of concept services and full production services to any scale, running on any infrastructure.

Vicorp UK Ltd Tel: +44 (0)1753 660500
Framewood Road Fax: +44 (0)1753 660501
Wexham Springs
Wexham www.vicorp.com
Buckinghamshire SL3 6PJ