The Customer Service Survey
It's Our Fault
Mon - June 26, 2006 02:29 PM in
I was in Chicago last week and gave a short talk at the Midwest Speech Technology Association meeting Tuesday evening. One of my themes was that the Speech Recognition technology industry has no one to blame but itself for the user backlash against self service technology. Time and again, VocaLabs testing has shown that it is not talking to a computer that callers object to. In truth, people actually prefer self service versus speaking to a call center agent if it is easy to use and serves the caller's needs. The problem has been that a fair share of Speech Recognition applications were built with a customer focus on saving money as the priority with serving callers a secondary consideration.
One of my recurring mantras is that if you build such a system to save money over serving callers, it will do neither. But if you build it with a priority of serving the caller first, the system will both serve the caller andsave money.
People are smarter than machines. They know when self service will meet their needs and when they need to speak to a real human. So when systems are built to force use of self service with such tactics as hiding the "opt out" to a live person, the caller will try and beat the system and will often call several times to try and get around the computer. Repeat calls are expensive just for the added telecom costs, and so defeat the save money motive. And if the caller fails to get their business done, they will frequently give up and simply take their business elsewhere. So if a customer service operation is sophisticated enough to realize and measure the impact poor service has on repeat business and customer retention, a case can reallybe made that forced use of automated technology in order to save overhead is a false and very foolish strategy.
Posted by Rick Rappe
People are smarter than machines. They know when self service will meet their needs and when they need to speak to a real human. So when systems are built to force use of self service with such tactics as hiding the "opt out" to a live person, the caller will try and beat the system and will often call several times to try and get around the computer. Repeat calls are expensive just for the added telecom costs, and so defeat the save money motive. And if the caller fails to get their business done, they will frequently give up and simply take their business elsewhere. So if a customer service operation is sophisticated enough to realize and measure the impact poor service has on repeat business and customer retention, a case can reallybe made that forced use of automated technology in order to save overhead is a false and very foolish strategy.
Posted by Rick Rappe
Posted at 02:29 PM | | | | |