The Adaptive Audio – VUI Cloud Blog

“A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”

- Wayne Gretzky 

That’s a great lesson for IT Directors and Customer Service Managers tasked with surviving in the changing landscape of customer service, social media, mobile devices and the internet. Anyone not paying attention to the influence these technologies have on customer service and the profitability of the enterprise risks losing serious ground to their competitors.

Empowering the consumer has made knowing where the puck is going to be all the more important today.  Some forward-looking companies have already embraced this concept with real action.

One fine example is AllyBank (www.ally.com). According to the company web site, “In 2009, we took the market in a new direction with our online retail bank. With it, we introduced 24/7 live customer care and an online savings account that has been named best in 2009 by Kiplinger’s and “Best Savings Account” by Money Magazine in 2010. Our lines of business include retail and wholesale auto financing, insurance, commercial financing, and home mortgage products — all clearly committed to the notion that being intensely customer-focused is just good business.”

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Speech is one of the few technologies that has the potential for enhancing telephone self-service. The technology, if used properly, provides motivation for significant upgrading of existing self-service installations.

That said, telephone self-service in general is one of the few technologies that is strongly disliked by the user community. This is largely because the bulk of the implementations have been done so poorly. According to ASR News, in 2010, the total self-service installed base was 8.6M ports worldwide. Figure 1 shows the geographic breakdown for these port deployments.

The projected CAGR for this market for 2010 – 2015 is 7.3% with the outsourced sector leading the charge. Virtually every enterprise has installed some form of telephone self-service. Figure 2 shows the number of inbound self-service call minutes broken down by vertical market segment.

Additionally, in 2010 there were:

• A total of 889,640 self-service port shipments, of which 79.54% were for the Customer Premise Equipment market.


• A total of 75.9B DTMF self-service inbound call minutes worldwide with Financial Services leading at 18.76B minutes.

• A total of 14.98B Speech self-service inbound call minutes in worldwide with Financial Services again leading with 4.16B call minutes.

If speech as a means of caller input is to succeed, it is clear that something dramatic needs to be done to significantly upgrade the quality of telephone self-service implementations. It is anticipated that the industry will respond to this challenge.

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