Spiegel Brands Inc. Implements Guided Self-Service Solution from Spoken Communications, Inc.

Guided speech IVR is far more effective and efficient than IVR alone.

BELLEVUE, WA (August 21, 2007) – Spoken Communications, the only provider of Guided Self-Service™ solutions, announced today at SpeechTEK in New York, that Spiegel Brands Inc., a leading retailer in women's apparel and home décor, has successfully implemented its ground-breaking Call Guiding ™ Solution in the Spiegel call center. This sophisticated system has enabled many of Spiegel’s live call center agents to become guides, who silently monitor and assist multiple callers simultaneously to ensure self- service success.

Through its use of the Spoken Call Guiding ™ Solution, the Spiegel call center has been able to replace the traditional menu-driven touch-tone approach to receiving and routing calls. This new self-service solution enables a human guide to monitor and assist four or more simultaneous calls behind the scenes increasing the quality of the caller’s experience, while reducing caller frustration and lowering costs.

“By having our agents act as guides, we are able to provide our customers with a better experience than traditional IVRs”, says Tom Scott, CIO Spiegel Brands Inc. “One of the biggest problems with traditional IVR solutions and even sophisticated voice recognition systems is that a customer must conform to a fixed set of menu options. Guided IVR eliminates the need for menus and gets over 90 percent of the calls directed to exactly the right destination, in just one step. While traditional IVR completion rates have been less than 30 percent, we have been able to experience completion rates of over 70 percent with the Spoken Call Guiding Solution. That translates into a much better experience for the customer and a significant reduction in call handle time and cost.”

Proven Best of Both Worlds Solution

"After observing the Spiegel Guide handling multiple calls silently and efficiently, I could clearly see the potential that the Spoken solution offers to our industry," said Dan Faulkner, director of product management and offer marketing at Nuance Communications, a leading provider of speech and imaging solutions. “By providing the speech recognition engines that support the Spoken Guided Self-Service solutions, Nuance is helping Spoken deliver a compelling and successful application to improve the caller experience.”

The division of traditional IVR technologies and live agents has been a long-standing problem for call centers, creating operational inefficiencies and challenging caller experiences. Spoken’s solution is the best of both worlds. By having agents act as guides, callers are ensured a successful automated experience, call centers get a more flexible call response system and live agents can shift their focus to selling and away from routine servicing.

“We are pleased to offer the industry this innovative guided self-service solution that integrates the knowledge and expertise of human agents with technology,” said Bill Norman, Chief Operating Officer at Spoken Communications. “We all know the customer is any company’s most important asset, yet these customers have been left alone to try and navigate the limitations of IVR menus or speech recognition applications. Spoken Communications Call Guiding ™ Solution with silent agents changes all that by providing a simple ‘How Can I Help You?’ approach that works.”

About Spoken Communications

Spoken Communications provides the only Guided Self-Service™ Solution that has fully integrated the human call center agent and speech technology so agents are able to handle multiple calls -- silently and simultaneously. This innovative approach, developed by Spoken, ensures call centers and their customers will have self-service success. Spoken Communications is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. When the caller experience matters, Spoken Communications is the only choice. For more information please visit www.spoken.com.

Guided Self-Service and Call Guiding are registered trademarks of Spoken Communications, Inc.
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Media Contacts:
Spoken Communications
Tonia Lopez-Song
Phone: (425) 679-0696
Email: spokenpr@spoken.com
Tags:
Spoken, Call Center, IVR

Hybrid Hopes

Walter Rolandi writes about hybrid architectures for IVR:

For those considering speech-rec technologies in their call centers, the first step is to understand that it is not safe to assume the technology will approach 100 percent accuracy in recognizing human utterances in a deployed speech-enabled application. So, what can those considering a move into speech realistically expect?

Many variables can affect the accuracy rate of a recognizer and great variation can be observed; most telephony-based speech-enabled systems obtain around 82 percent to 84 percent overall accuracy. This means that the average user will experience one or two recognition failures for every 10 utterances that he makes. Alone, an accuracy rate in the low-to-mid 80 percent range might seem acceptable, but most users would find that level unacceptable when considering the cumulative effect of recognition failures. In a nutshell, just two or three recognition errors during an IVR interaction can evoke a seemingly unwarranted emotional response on the user's part--and it doesn't take many mistakes to get a user angry.

Unfortunately, some of the most severe usability problems of speech-enabled systems result from speech recognition failures. The solution is hybrid architectures--it is now possible to remove all of the experience of speech failure from a speech-enabled IVR.

Voice solutions provider Spoken Communications supports a hybrid architecture in which the speech recognizer is backed up by a human who can monitor four or more interactions at once. The human guide or assistant does nothing during the interaction; most of time the recognizer is likely to get things right. However, the guide is alerted in cases where the recognizer is uncertain of what the user said... Read More

Tags:
Spoken, Call Center, IVR