The Adaptive Audio – VUI Cloud Blog

The hallmarks of a great self-service voice application are not a whole lot different from that of a great CSR. After all, they serve (or are supposed to serve) the same purpose; your customers need for service and information via telephone. In fact, from the caller’s perspective, engaging with an IVR application is similar to engaging with another human. Callers are, generally speaking, fair and reasonable individuals that are willing to work with a CSR or technology as long as that engagement seems to be working for them.

Figure 1 shows how an “engagement threshold” exists for the caller when they use an IVR application the first few times. Notice that, though it may be slightly different for Speech and DTMF, there is a significant threshold after 2 – 3 successful interactions by the caller. This critical period is when callers ask themselves whether this automated process will work for them so they don’t have to wait for a CSR, or whether they are wasting their time when they may end up talking to a CSR anyway.

Figure 1 - The Caller Engagement Threshold

Reaching this “buy in” point is critical to the success of any voice application. The likelihood that a returning caller will use the Read more…

In an earlier post and supporting white paper I talked about how caller adaptive technology helps the mobile experience and the handling of callers of different skill levels. Here, I want to present supporting data for this type of technology – data collected from production trials.

Based on production metrics gathered at various installations,the figure below illustrates the relationships between average call length, the number of script levels and the effectiveness of adaptive technology at optimizing the call process.

These data indicate improvements in the Average Handle Time (AHT), Average Handle Rate (AHR), IVR Utilization (IVR turns per call) and Caller Input Error Rates.

The benefits of adaptive technology to optimize self-service telephone calls vary based on the design, content and average call duration of Read more…

More than ever in the past, today’s telephony based voice applications must address large and very diverse calling populations.

This audience uses a wide variety of personal, mobile and landline based devices in various modes to access information over the phone.

Some facts and figures:

• At the end of 2011, there were 6 billion mobile subscriptions, according to the International Telecommunication Union.

• Mobile subscriptions outnumber fixed lines 5:1 (more so in developing nations)

• According to the US Census Bureau, the hearing loss population in the US has grown to over 31.5 million

• Linguists estimate that half of the world’s population is bilingual and there are about 5,000-6,000 different languages spoken in the world today.

• People of a particular culture or regional dialect may be comfortable with long pauses at the conclusion of a sentence, while people of another may find this demonstrates disinterest, lack of attentiveness and even disrespect.

Mobile phone use globally in 2011

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