IA&A Technologies - say it and get it!  

May 2003

Editor: Gary Kay
garykay@intelligentassistant.com

Greetings fellow decision maker,

The official  Intelligent Assistant™ product range launch at the Hospitality Live Expo went really well - thanks to you and all the leads you sent to the show we received many positive contacts with businesses wanting to use our call handling technology within the near future. At the show we had live demonstrations of Receptionist TINA - the virtual receptionist with multiple Intelligent Assistant™  modules. 

The Booking Intelligent Assistant™ was a great attraction allowing people to call in at the stand and interactively make a full confirmed reservation at La Campana Spanish Restaurant. The great statistic resulting in over 100 callers trying this IVR demo was that 92% either completed the booking transaction or enjoyed the interactive experience. The other 8% either quit halfway or got confused. Not bad when you consider the cross section of people trying the demo were from small town waitering staff through to corporate hotel chain account managers and CEOs. 

The Ordering Intelligent Assistant™ showed how inventory and stock could be ordered over the phone and the results of the transaction made available for accounting packages like Pastel Accounting. The other products namely PhoneNotify, AutoCaller and Recording Intelligent Assistant™  also showed how professional call handling technology can provide great return on investment (ROI) for just about any business. This months eNews highlights how IVR and speech recognition solutions can give the ROI your business needs.   

Happy reading...

In This Issue

Technology specials | The ROI using IVR and speech recognition technology

A wise investment is one with a guaranteed return. Senior Managers are cautious about committing funds to projects and naturally reluctant to risk investing in projects that have uncertain returns. Investment in Information Technology is no different in that it can only be justified by a clearly quantified forecast of the returns it is expected to deliver. Moreover, the real motivation for such an investment lies in the assurance that the initial capital outlay will not only be preserved, through the acquisition of goods and equipment for example, but that it will provide a vehicle that produces sufficient additional value, or grows sufficiently in value itself, to return a profit on that outlay.

To achieve and sustain a return greater than the initial expenditure, i.e. to return a profit, it is necessary for an investment to generate revenue. Generally the three sources from which this revenue can be derived are; targeted selling efforts, better customer management and focused customer retention. Only by contributing either directly or indirectly to these activities can an investment vehicle generate the revenue that will produce a return on its investment, or ROI

Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology has been around for more than a decade and has proven its potential to generate return on investment. Early implementations of the technology were mostly centred on the activity of improving customer management and provided interactive self-service solutions based on auto-attendants and touch-tone interaction systems which generated ROI mainly by cutting the high staffing costs contributing up to 60% of customer contact centre operating expenses.

It was possible, for example, to estimate the ROI likely to be realised at various intervals and milestones after deploying an IVR self-service solution by determining the costs of answering a phone call, compared with the cost of responding to an email, compared with the cost of an IVR interaction. These figures could be weighed against the complete cost of the IVR system including development, software packages, servers and associated hardware, maintenance and license fees and other costs, to arrive at an accurate prediction of when ROI would be achieved and when the system would begin generating profit.

Significant recent advances in technologies such as speech recognition, text-to-speech recognition, text-to-speech translation and computer-telephony integration (CTI) have seen IVR solutions evolve into more sophisticated applications, involved not only in customer management activity but in customer marketing too. The cost savings derived from reduced staffing expenses, facility costs and call charges still remain very attractive benefits of the latest interactive self-service systems.

However, today's systems go beyond the cost savings derived from customer management activities and are making additional contributions to the profits of market-leading organizations worldwide by contributing to their other revenue generating activities: targeted selling and customer retention. How can IVR systems do this? They do it by enabling businesses to extend trading hours and market reach, by allowing businesses to rapidly develop and deploy advanced revenue-generating applications such as scripted cross-selling and up-selling campaigns, and by freeing up customer service, sales, and support representatives (CSRs) so that they can concentrate on revenue-producing tasks, promote customer loyalty, and collect market intelligence.

Lets look at some of these ROI generating activities and the requirements for IVR systems to achieve them in more detail. IVR self-service solutions mean that your products and services are there when customers want them, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This increases revenue by enabling customers to pay-bills, buy products, make bookings and perform other revenue-generating transactions around the clock. Extended business hours also extend your business reach across time zones allowing you to be truly competitive in the global economy.

Forrester research has shown that it costs ten times more to recruit a new customer than it does to retain a current one. Advanced, natural sounding speech responses deployed in powerful self-service applications promote customer loyalty by allowing customers to conduct a greater range of revenue generating transactions, making self-service more efficient, easier and more convenient for them, and creating a favourable impression of your company as an innovator. By offering customers the best experience, they will come back regularly and tell their friends and family about you.

IVR is focused on service. Speech enabled call automation improves the user interface and provides the caller with a really good experience, increasing customer retention through reduced wait times, reduced number of interactions required to resolve customer issues and overall higher satisfaction. Self-service applications that take advantage of mixed media resources mean that all your information resources including computers, fax servers and telephones are contributing to a first-rate customer service. Customers should be able to shift from the self-service application to direct contact with a CSR if necessary, without repeating information, such as account numbers, that they've already given. It follows that the ROI potential of self-service applications can be increased if you choose a solution that can be synchronized with your live-service applications. CTI-enabled IVR solutions allow careful managing of call processing and integrate seamlessly with databases and sales management tools to provide information about callers before calls are answered.

Your solution needs to be based on an open, modular design that lets you take advantage of emerging technologies and scale up to handle increasing traffic. Ideally self-service solutions should employ an intuitive, robust design language that make it easy for developers to create and modify IVR applications and workspaces to meet changing business requirements. These environments allow you to rapidly capitalize on business opportunities and reduce development, installation and integration costs, increasing ROI.

The pattern of ROI which has emerged from organizations investing in IVR indicates the payback period for most companies is 6 to 12 months and in some cases even 3 to 4 months. The cost reduction benefits of IVR systems have always assured that investments in self-service call handling solutions present a clear path to ROI. However, with companies under constant pressure to improve profitability, the role that automated call handling and call routing can play in ramping up sales is taking increasing focus in ROI calculations along with the realisation that IVR is fast becoming a marketing imperative.

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