3 QUESTIONS:
               Improved Customer Service, New Revenue Opportunities with Speech-Enabled Apps

With Peter Mahoney, vice president of worldwide marketing for SpeechWorks, which makes speech-enabled products for call centers, carrier solutions, auto-attendant systems and embedded speech technologies.

Question:  With customer-facing speech applications, how do you help someone find that sweet spot between maximizing the profit opportunity that's available without hurting customer service and experience?
                             Mahoney: You mentioned one key trend that we're trying to help people with through some product capability, which is a shift that customers are going through over the last few years in their objectives for deploying speech technology in their apps. I think if you looked in 1999, people were just looking for something that was kind of cool. Something that would generate some excitement or potentially generate some revenue for them. Then when the economy got a little bit softer, the shift moved quite sharply over to an objective of purely saving costs. People were looking at all potential ways to get costs out of their organization. And they used automation, including speech and touch tone and Web-based apps, to replace people in their organizations. So that was a clear driving factor in some speech investment and objectives. Probably, 2001 through 2002-ish, maybe into 2003. What we've seen over the last year or so is an increasing shift in really trying to balance the customer satisfaction with the cost savings. Ultimately, we're seeing now more people looking at ways to increase revenue or increase profitability with the result of deploying speech apps.

Question:  So are people approaching it more from growth than cost savings, or is this not an area that  has hit yet?
                             Mahoney: There clearly are areas where people are looking at growth, so one way to think about that is there have been speech-enabled apps for some time that have been focused on revenue creation, but I think if you look at the bulk of the investment, it's around providing customer service in a more efficient way that seems to work for customers. We see more and more of that stuff getting integrated together, because it's like when the Web world made a big investment toward CRM over the last several years, taking a whole view of the customer. When you have a contact with a customer, you want to obviously service their need, but there's also a revenue opportunity. We're seeing more of that. As an example, Virgin Mobile recently deployed a really interesting application, where they provide customer service to users of their wireless phones, and they have a very large pre-paid business. They actually have a lot of service questions, where people want to make an inquiry about their bill, etc., but they also look at it as an opportunity for them to renew and buy more minutes. So there's a mixture of objectives, and whenever they get someone on a call, their app, at the right time, based on what they know about the people, what they know about how many minutes they may have left, can offer them an easy way to do what they call topping-up their minutes, which is basically adding more minutes to their pre-paid cell phone account.

Question:  Tell me more about what metrics you would use to help customers make financial determinations on the TCO and ROI for implementation of a customer-facing voice app. What direct benefits can they put in, and are there indirect benefits that can be considered at the same time, and how will they avoid affecting the customer experience negatively?
                             Mahoney: Absolutely. I liken this to back in the 80s, when desktop publishing came out. Everybody in the world was a publisher all of a sudden because they were empowered with these new tools, but if you weren't very talented or creative, then you were able to publish not very interesting stuff. Just because people may have the right tools doesn't mean they're going to create a strong app. And there are obviously companies like ours, we've deployed over 600 customer implementations, so we've got a lot of experience. But someone could obviously deploy an app that really didn't take advantage of the technology the right way and wouldn't do the right thing by their customers. So we're realists and we understand that not everything is done the right way all the time. But the correct deployment involves a clear understanding of not only your customers' goals, your callers' goals, but also the business objectives. So we go through a fairly well-defined process, where we take people through application discovery, integrating a number of data points that we've derived from the hundreds of implementations that we've done, looking at apps and considerations to make where we can find savings opportunity for people. And then we mix that in with our understanding of the caller objectives, our experience on how to make callers happy, as well as the unique caller objectives that they may have for their population. We mix those all together and come up with a final determination that balances making the customer happy with driving the highest return on investment for the app. The returns come from things like cost savings in some cases, around not having to hire as many operators to handle increased demand, as an example, or spillover. Some people may think that means I can get rid of a bunch of operators. What we find is that in some cases, it means that more and more companies use speech not as a way only to satisfy their customers and provide better customer service to the people who are connected to their live operators, but handle things like peak loads and traffic much better. You can't plan on something like a hurricane, for example, so Verizon has a repair line that's driven by speech technology from ScanSoft, and during one of the hurricanes this last fall, one of their call centers just went live with our new app. They would have never been able to handle all the inbound traffic, all the incoming calls, with live operators, but they were able with this new app to not only handle the calls, but in many cases, resolve the customer's problems in an automated way. So it's a really cool app. ... Otherwise, either you'd have frustrated customers who might have switched from your service, you'd have the cost of customer churn, or you would have had to go to a third-party service to handle some of your excess overflow calls, which obviously would have some hard costs associated with it.