From Speech Recognition Update #120 (June 2003)

Nuance customers discuss performance and payoffs - Bell Canada, Energy South, UBS, Lloyds TSB, Avon, Ydilo, Verizon Wireless, Merrill Lynch, AT&T Wireless, Z-Tel, Delta, Rogers AT&T, British Airways

On April 29, at the sixth annual Nuance V-World speech conference in San Francisco, a number of Nuance customers outlined qualitative and quantitative benefits. In addition to Strong Funds (p. 7 of June newsletter) and Expedia.com (p. 7 of June newsletter), other companies highlighted the benefits they found in using telephone speech technology.

Bell Canada

Bell Canada, Canada's largest telecommunications carrier, created Emily as the voice of the company's 310-BELL automated customer care portal (SRU # 116, February 2003, p. 1). The system routes calls to the appropriate customer service representative and automated some services directly.

Belinda Banks, associate director, customer care, Bell Canada, said that 310-BELL receives 16 million calls per year and uses 1,800 agents, and was among the “top ten” customer irritants before the automated service was installed. Introduced in October 2002 and fully rolled out in Toronto in December 2002, the service provided significant cost savings in addition to improving the customer experience. The cost, for example, to activate call waiting service was $0.25 per call for the automated service, versus $6 for an agent-processed call. Reflecting increased ease of use, there was a 51% increase in call activation completions while the call durations decreased by 20%. The savings this year alone are estimated at $5 million, an eight-month Return On Investment (ROI). Banks concluded, “Speech recognition is the future of 310-BELL.”

Energy South

Energy South is the new name for Mobile Gas, the Alabama-based utility. Alan Hobbs, director of customer service, Energy South, described a system from Datria used for field workers to increase internal efficiency (p. 27). The system lets field-service workers use wireless phones instead of laptops for indicating status of jobs and getting the next stop. Hobbs indicated that the system was half the cost of laptops, faster to deploy, easier to use, and more efficient operationally. The system, he said, saved the equivalent of 45 minutes per worker per day, which equated to getting about 1.5 more jobs done per day per worker. The system reduced overtime by 30% and reduced clerical labor in the company’s offices by 50%. (It even led to a 33% decrease in office supplies!) Service revenues increased by 18%.

UBS

UBS was formerly the United Bank of Switzerland, but international expansion led them to make the name less country-specific. The company’s customer service center handles 30,000 calls per day. In Switzerland, callers may speak French, German, Italian, or English.

According to Joerg Bruckner, associate director, customer service center development, at UBS, the objective of using speech recognition was to automate standard queries to free agents to spend more time with customers on more complex queries. IVR use had been going down, but, after the introduction of speech, using rose 80%. Agents are now called “strategic specialists,” Bruckner said, and are big fans of the system.

Lloyds TSB

Peter Littlewood, senior manager, interactive voice recognition, at Lloyds TSB, a large UK bank, noted that automation using voice is in part motivated by the fact that 20% of UK phones are still rotary phones. The bank’s Phone Bank Express, personified as “Phoebie,” provides balances, gives recent transactions, allows bill payments, and automates fund transfers. A rating by customers of the speech-automated service gave it 90% good-to-excellent marks. The system has 95% call completion of tasks, 99% availability 24/7, and handles 30 million transactions per year.

Lloyds is also using the system for “sales optimization,” Littlewood said. For example, a caller who has an overdraft charge may be automatically offered an overdraft protection line of credit. The system also can offer selected callers credit cards. For the best customers, Lloyds TSB is using speaker verification to avoid their having to provide other information for authentication. Littlewood indicated that 37% of calls to its automated lines come from top-valued customers.

Littlewood said that using the automated services in the UK had its problems. Competitors countered with advertisements saying, “We won’t put you through to a robot,” and agents often felt threatened by the automation. Upper management assumed the speech recognition was less accurate than agents. These problems were overcome, for example, by showing that speech recognition was more accurate than agents at name-and-address capture. Speech is now viewed as a “core strategic competency” within Lloyds TSB, Littlewood said.

Avon Products

Avon is the well-known purveyor of cosmetics and other products through an army of sales representatives (3.9 million worldwide, with 600,000 in the US), with $6.2 billion in annual revenues. The company gets about 12 million calls per year regarding order status, product availability, and other inquiries from their US agents. The call center was facing $1.5 million in increased call-center costs in the next year, according to Michelle Norcross, manager system design and integration, at Avon, when they decided to implement a speech system through Syntellect and Nuance.

The automated system can handle inquiries, take orders, and place outbound calls for order confirmation and to request payments. The system is personalized to provide birthday greetings, anniversary-of-joining-Avon greetings, or congratulations on sales to agents. The cost per call before the automated system was $3; after automation, $0.20. Automated call completion is above 70%. The result is an annual savings of $1.9 million, with 87% satisfaction rates by callers. The company is considering adding speaker verification, Norcross said, both for personalization and security.

Ydilo

Ydilo is a ticket-sale-automation company in Madrid, Spain. The Ydilo Voice Ticketing solution is designed to automate the complete purchasing process for ticket sales of any kind including concert, theater, sport events, plane, train and bus tickets or vacation packages. Its cinema ticketing application recently processed in excess of 10,000 tickets in one weekend after the first Harry Potter film was released in Spain. And in just three days, Ydilo was able to process more than 20,000 tickets for the Spanish “Copa del Rey” Soccer cup final.

Carlos Gomez Muñoz of Ydilo said that the automated speech system paid for itself in two days when first used to sell 55,000 tickets for a Bruce Springsteen concert in 32 hours. The company has completely eliminated phone agents, he said.

Verizon Wireless

Cheryl Noti, associate director, business portal, at Verizon Wireless, reported on the company’s voice-activated services, such as voice-activated dialing, secure voice access to company email, and information services (SRU # 113, November 2002, p. 1), for which the company charges monthly subscription fees. The enterprise sales force loves the services, she said, because there is an “exploding interest among corporate customers.”

Merrill Lynch

Merrill Lynch, a leading financial management and advisory company, uses Nuance speech technologies to automate the largest volume of its phone-based customer service processes. 1-800-MERRILL provides 24/7 speech-driven access to financial account information. The system was developed by TellMe (which also hosts the voice infrastructure that executes the VoiceXML applications).

Jannine Vitelli, director, Merrill Lynch global private client services and technology, said that Merrill Lynch supports over 77 million contacts annually from both internal and external clients. The company has the capacity at two call centers for 1,500 simultaneous inbound calls and 500 simultaneous automated calls. Over 50% of customer contacts are by phone rather than the Web.

There are 300 ports that can provide Nuance-based speech recognition services. The system uses barge-in capabilities and a flattened menu to make it easy for callers to get the service they want. Vitelli indicated that the system had a vocabulary of 6,600 words other than stock names.

Vitelli said that the focus of the system shifted over time from increased automation to customer ease-of-use. It took over three years and $4 million to implement, she said, yet paid for itself in cost savings in the first 19 months, as the average length of a call fell from 108 seconds to 93 seconds. Automation increased from 81% to 89%. The company is forecasting $2.9 million in cost avoidance in 2003. Expansion is planned in areas such as targeted campaigns, voice verification, and personalized menus.

AT&T Wireless

Michael Culleton, director of customer care and risk management at AT&T Wireless, the second-largest US wireless carrier with 20.9 subscribers, said the company has 36 call centers handling 13 million calls per month. Currently, 1.5 million of those calls are handled using speech recognition using a Nortel Softswitch, Nuance 8.0 engine, Cisco call-center selection management, and Genesys voice/data transport and screen pop for agents. Culleton said that natural-language speech recognition can be a differentiator in customer retention and satisfaction.

Culleton said that the base solution was deployed, and voice grammar recognition was at 94% after the first release. The system continues to off-load agents, reducing cost by a factor of four. Natural language routing is improving the number of calls resolved in one contact, improving the customer experience.

Z-Tel

Douglas Wood, director of product innovation at landline telephone service company Z-Tel, said that accuracy of the company’s Personal Voice Assistant (SRU # 117, March 2003, p. 1) was improved from 78.6% to 89.7% by using Nuance Professional Services after Z-Tel attempted doing the tuning themselves. Personal Voice Assistant plays a prominent role in the company’s marketing campaign, and has generated “a buzz among sales agents in how it improves their opportunities to close sales.” Results are not fully in, but the rate of usage and adoption is increasing, and feedback from users has been “very favorable.” The company is planning to support about two million users by the end of 2003.

Delta Air Lines

Karla Morgan, general manager, call center operations and voice strategy at Delta Airlines, reported on the company’s flight information system. The system was deployed in February 2002, and the completion rate (compared to the touch-tone system) increased from 85% to 90%. The system asks for flight number and date, and then verifies the last name (spelled by the caller) against the manifest of passengers booked on the flight. In addition, the company was better able to serve those customers who didn’t have a flight number by asking for the time of flight or similar information.

Rogers AT&T

Linda Kennedy, senior manager, IVR infrastructure, Rogers AT&T Wireless, Canada’s leading national wireless service provider, reported on the company’s "Pay As You Go" Service for prepaid wireless accounts. Developed by Intervoice, Pay As You Go customers interact with the “Melanie” voice persona to access account information, buy additional airtime, and learn about new service offerings. The Rogers AT&T Wireless Pay As You Go self service system fields 1.5 million customer calls per month, with 94% of the calls handled by the speech system.

British Airways

Developed by Aspect Communications and Nuance, British Airways' voice-driven flight information line (SRU # 117, March 2003, p. 10) has helped the airline reduce its call center cost-per-call from $3.00 to just $0.16. Although not represented directly at the conference, Nuance described British Airways success.

Before deploying speech, British Airways maintained 128 different telephone numbers to support its various call center locations, which proved to be a costly and complex proposition. By implementing the speech solution, the airline was able to decrease its number of customer service lines to three: reservations, flight information, and customer care.