Enable Speech Recognition in your Contact Center

Whether through their PC, Smartphone or Digital Assistant devices, customers today have embraced the use of speech recognition when seeking simple, quick and straightforward ways to accomplish a task or access information.  They expect no less when reaching out to your contact center.

Speech Recognition technologies including speech recognition, text-to-speech, multifactor authentication (voice biometrics + questions) can be used in conjunction with your Genesys Customer Experience Platform. Assets like Genesys Voice Platform within PureEngage enable your contact center to successfully complete your customers’ desired transaction or getting them to the right agent quickly and easily.  You can save agent handling time, improve customer experience and all for lower costs when compared to purely agent handled calls.

How can I use these technologies in my contact center?

Speech recognition can greatly enhance your callers’ ability to self-serve in a voice channel by enabling more complex and personalized interactions.  It can be used to identify or authenticate the caller using voice biometrics and multi-factor authentication – saving agent handling time and frustration (what agent enjoys asking authentication questions?) by conducting the authentication in self-service before transferring the caller to an agent or to an appropriate self-service application.  By combining voice biometrics with existing questions, you gain significant improvements in fraud prevention and avoid social engineering.

Speech recognition can be used to help determine the reason for a call, along with other data you have on hand about the customer so that you can quickly transfer the caller to the right agent with the right skills and availability.  Faster and more accurate transfers improve customer satisfaction (think NPS scores) and increase employee satisfaction while reducing costs by reducing agent handling time. Automated interactions typically cost 25% or less when compared to agent handled interactions on a per minute basis.  If agent handled interactions cost between $1 and $3 dollars per minute a five-minute call costs between $5 and $15.  Typical automated call handling costs between .25 & .50 per minute or between $1.25 and $2.15 per call.  By shifting even 15-20% of your call handling time from agents to automation, you can reduce headcount requirements and costs significantly.

After business hours or during peak busy periods when agent availability is an issue, your callers call completely self-serve for many common interactions using speech recognition and text-to-speech so that they can request and receive information specific to them.  Generally, any transaction in your contact that agents handle today by asking for some specific information from the call, typing that into a computer screen and then reading the answer back to the call can easily be automated with speech recognition.  Things like what’s my account balance, when was my order shipped, can I get the address of the closet store can be automated.  This not only keeps your customers out of the hold queue, it can help reduce your overall agent headcount demand and provide your customers with access to information they need even if your contact center is closed.

LumenVox speech recognition technology can also be used in outbound calling when customers to confirm orders, provide shipping information or provide other important timely information.  LumenVox Call Progress analysis can improve the message delivery success of your outbound calling applications by helping you determine whether the call has been machine answered or live answered and then delivering the correct payload successfully for machine answers or engaging with live callers using speech recognition and test-to-speech.

Many of our customers find that the same technologies can be used to reduce costs and improve CX for their employees also.  Applications like Automated Password Reset can empower your customers and employees to reset their passwords without the involvement of a help desk agent. Save them from having to remember security questions or PINs that are easily lost or shared. Reliably authenticate your users anywhere and anytime with a simple spoken passphrase, a selfie or security questions.

LumenVox’ brings 17 years of experience in speech recognition automation to your contact center.  We provide the core ASR, TTS and Voice Biometric technologies to speech-enable your customer interactions.  As an AppFoundry Partner with Genesys, we provide a variety of speech recognition technologies and applications such as Password Reset, all fully tested and certified to speech-enable your Genesys environment.

Sound Interesting?

We have a quick “5 Simple Questions” process to help you identify specific use cases in your contact center.  If you’re curious about how speech recognition can be used in your contact center reach out to LumenVox and we’ll work with your Genesys representative to ask those questions and show you how you can take advantage of speech related technologies to improve your customer experience, make your agents happier and reduce costs. You can also visit our app listing on the AppFoundry Marketplace.

This post was co-authored by Jeff Hopper. As LumenVox’ VP Client Services Jeff manages technical support, training, partner certification and Sales Engineering. He brings more than 20 years of expertise in speech recognition and other contact center technologies.