by Moira Dorsey

with Harley Manning and Caroline L. Carney

 E X E C U T I V E S UMMA RY
Speech interfaces offer usability advantages that well-designed touchtone systems can’t.

United Airlines
worked with Nuance Communications to design speech interactions that leverage these advantages for
the benefit of their customers and the business. What was at the heart of their success? A design process
that began by setting business goals for speech-enabled phone self-service, identified the user goals that
could best be served with speech to achieve their business goals, and incorporated key players and skill
sets throughout.
TARGET AUDIENCE
Customer experience executive
UNITED AIRLINES LEVERAGES SPEECH ADVANTAGES FOR PHONE SELF-SERVICE
Speech interfaces can deliver interaction advantages — and business results — that touchtone systems
can’t match, but only when they are designed to support the goals of the target users.1 As they worked
through design, development, and deployment of new speech applications, team members at United
Airlines and its speech vendor Nuance Communications:
· Set business objectives. Before making decisions about what new applications to build with
speech, the United team agreed upon two key goals: 1) improve — or maintain — the quality of
the experience that customers have via the phone; and 2) increase the proportion of customer
interactions taking place within phone self-service.
· Identified user goals that aligned with their business objectives. Speech interfaces let firms
automate new types of customer activities that touchtone can’t support. To uncover these
opportunities, the United team identified the top 25 reasons customers call, based on a study of
2,000 agent calls. From that list, the team prioritized customer goals that it could support with
speech self-service while maintaining — or improving — customer experience.
· Engaged key players at the right moments. To succeed, interaction design projects should solicit
input and expertise from appropriate stakeholders — but only at relevant points in the design
process.2 The United team relied on a joint process that it has used with the project team at Nuance
for the past five years. The process enabled team members from United — who had the best
understanding of the customer-agent interactions the speech system would handle — to
design the call flows. Members of the professional services team at Nuance then drew on their
experience designing speech applications to create dialogues that help customers move through
those call flows.
A Process Focused On The Intersection Of User And Business Goals Drives Results
Following a business-centric design process helped the United team get the most out of the
interaction advantages of speech. As a result, the team’s speech deployments:
· Support more user goals with phone self-service. United’s research revealed that many
customers who call during a fare sale want to shop for itineraries, but call volumes can be
high.” United’s “book and ticket” application lets customers do everything from researching
an itinerary and getting a price to booking and paying for a ticket. Similarly, the Mileage Plus
Award application now lets customers use phone self-service to search for itineraries available
for purchase with miles and put themselves on a watch list in addition to requesting an
upgrade.3
· Span multiple back-end applications with a single interface. Based on their understanding of
users and how they accomplish their goals, United tailored designs to match customer behaviors
rather than system constraints. For example, United’s Mileage Plus Award application lets
customers who don’t have enough miles for a ticket pay for it instead, even though the awards
purchase and cash purchase systems are separate on the back end. The interface is designed to
let customers move seamlessly from the Mileage Plus Award application to the ticket purchasing
application, where they can complete the transaction and obtain the ticket without having to
transfer to an agent.
· Cross channels seamlessly. Looking at how customers use different channels together in
the pursuit of a single goal helped United uncover opportunities for partial automation. For
example, in phone self-service customers can book a ticket reserved previously via phone or
another channel. For customers who search for an itinerary in phone self-service but want
to book it with an agent, the system takes the information customers provide in the itinerary
search application and transfers it via screen pop to an agent. To make this transfer seamless,
team members at United completed two key tasks. First, they built a custom computer telephony
integration (CTI) interface that lets the agent know not only who the customer is, but also what
she did in self-service and where she left off. Then they trained agents to handle these scenarios.
Best Practices | United Air Lines: Optimizing For Business And User Goals Drives Speech Success 3
June 16, 2006 © 2006, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited
R E C O M M E N D A T I O N S
DRIVE SPEECH SUCCESS BY SUPPORTING BUSINESS-CRITICAL USER GOALS
To realize the business benefits of speech, start off on the right foot.
· Focus on both usability and the business benefits of speech. By taking the keypad out of
the interaction, speech interfaces offer interaction advantages that make phone self-service
systems easier to use and learn. These advantages drive business benefits like enabling firms
to automate new categories of customer goals. Some firms miss these opportunities because
they simply replace their existing touchtone applications with speech. To avoid this, look
to design experts at firms like Nuance Communications and Voice Partners for help with
conducting research. This will allow you to uncover the user goals speech can support and
educate everyone who will have input into decisions about the benefits of speech.
· Investigate how users’ goals extend beyond the phone. Thirty-six percent of respondents
to Forrester’s Q4 2005 Customer Experience Peer Research Panel study report that it’s either
critical or very important to shift more interactions to phone self-service.4 Companies can
increase the number of customer interactions they support with phone self-service by
using VoiceXML and CTI technologies to partially automate goals that customers start or
complete in other channels. To uncover these opportunities, firms should plan to investigate
how and why customers use different channels in conjunction with each other. Companies
should bolster analytics data on customer behavior within the channels they control with
ethnographic research that uncovers behavior in unmanaged channels like third-party sites
and independent travel agents.5
ENDNOTES
1 The added capabilities speech offers over touchtone leave more room for error. As a result, a user-centered
design process executed by skilled speech interaction designers is necessary for success. See the October 4,
2004, Best Practices “Speech Helps Boost Phone Self-Service.”
2 Forrester’s interviews with experts reveal that firms’ cultural factors and internal processes matter far more
than organization when it comes to improving customer experience. To make improvements, firms must
focus on building a shared understanding of how to think about customer experience and put the process
and skills in place. See the March 31, 2006, Best Practices “Culture And Process Drive Better Customer
Experiences.”
3 United’s Mileage Plus Award system enabled users to request an upgrade prior to the firm’s recent speech
application additions.
4 Forrester surveyed 105 members of its Customer Experience Peer Research Panel in Q4 2005 about their
customer experience plans for 2006. See the February 3, 2006, Trends “Customer Experience Spending
Booms In 2006.”
Best Practices | United Air Lines: Optimizing For Business And User Goals Drives Speech Success 4
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5 Forrester graded reference personas provided by Web design agencies for a Forrester Wave™ report in
2005. Overall, the personas improved compared with the 2004 edition of the report: Three-quarters of the
agencies passed the five tests. See the November 18, 2005, Best Practices “Persona Best Practices Of Web
Design Agencies.”