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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

May - 2005 - issue > Technology

Using speech automation strategically

Amit Desai
Saturday, April 30, 2005
Amit Desai
Excellent customer service continues to be a key business differentiator. The challenge businesses and call centers have historically faced is that increasing service levels involves high costs.

In addition, as businesses strive to differentiate themselves, they seek to introduce new call center services. These new services; that notifies customers when a flight is delayed or that which handles inquiries about frequent flyer account details, often don’t produce revenues, and such call centers are pressured to introduce these services without increasing costs.

Enter the promise of speech applications. Speech applications came to the market in the late 1990s with the promise of liberating call centers from the age-old dilemma of service levels versus costs. The promise of speech automation was to improve both service levels and costs simultaneously. And while the applications have improved over the years, traditional speech applications never delivered on this promise.

According to Gartner Research, “Call centers around the world are using speech recognition solutions to automate customer interactions.

Most of these are point solutions.” The real value of speech automation, however, cannot be gained with point solutions. It can be derived when an application can be deployed strategically in the call center, by servicing the full spectrum of call types with performance and efficiency.


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