In my current role, I have the pleasure of observing many different organizations’ deployments of outsourced speech enabled IVRs (hereafter, IVR.) Having been on the delivery side for ten years, it has been very enlightening to be on the customer side.

Most often, we see the classic command and control relationship between customers and their infrastructure partners (vendors) where the customer provides requirements in the form of what, when and where.  Sometimes customer issue commands on virtual cocktail napkins, while others have cadres of Project Managers, Application Owners, various IT managers and business managers involved.

Having a well-staffed and experienced team managing your outsourced IVRs increases the likelihood of good outcomes.  However, even very professional command and control management structures eventually begin to break down and mistakes begin to occur.  When call volumes are high, and/or complexity of applications and routing are even moderate, these mistakes quickly snowball.   This is the most common status of outsourced IVRs where our customers ask for our help. Usually, a significant effort is required to correct the situation.

Business publications constantly cover the reasons why command and control methods break down, so we will not get into details here. In short, disparate organizations change at different rates of speed. Therefore, the dance you started with breaks down when the lead dancer changes the dance or the dance partner changes and cannot seem to follow the lead.

We observe a common theme resonating among the most successful customers; treat your entire infrastructure like a well-trained orchestra.  Each performer has a distinct role, and every one of them must be up to the task of playing their piece. As the maestro, you as the customer need to carefully choose your players, and constantly listen to them to ensure that they are not getting lazy and not practicing.  You should also have a backup player in the wings, ready to take over if your first chair player is unable to fulfill their role.

To extend the analogy, renowned orchestras exist due to strong conductors who carefully listen to their performers, and strong performers who listen to their compatriots while taking their lead from the maestro.

This means that your telecom provider, your outsourcing platform provider, application management and business management and other team members all need to meet regularly in shared meetings to review performance, and plan future offerings.  Meeting with each vendor separately and trying to coordinate through command and control results in more effort placed in communication, more risk in miscommunication, and timing discrepancies. Imagine trying to listen to the Nutcracker Suite when every player practices separately, never meeting until the Big Performance. Moreover, doing so without first tuning as a group. OUCH!

One of our banking customers regularly meets in this fashion, and the meetings are quite humdrum.  Everyone is well aware of upcoming changes in detail, all buy into the coordination and all risks are visible within the entire group.

Call volumes are staggering even in the banking industry; however, the lack of turbulence is astounding to anyone who has not experienced an orchestrated IVR management offering. Note that the telecom and IVR vendors are well known and involved with other organizations who attempt to manage by command and control. Therefore, there is no magic vendor sauce. It is all about bringing your vendors together, treating them like an expensive, yet experienced and well-practiced orchestra.  When you move between command and control to orchestrated environments, it is beautiful music to your ears!

Try it by inviting all of your vendors in for a joint meeting. Ask for the proper representatives, those who actually deliver or manage delivery, and get a sense of whether you have the right players on your team. If they cannot play well together, it is likely time to get rid of that player who makes everyone else cringe. However, the most likely result is that they will play well together; they were just looking for a strong maestro.

Speech recognition is continually improving. Note the functionality that Google Now and Apple Siri provide from devices that are notably difficult to interact with using text.  However, has it really changed much in the contact center? Sure, a few large corporations have implemented natural language understanding or “conversational” IVR apps using traditional speech recognition. The seven-digit cost, covering the cost of the software and ongoing very expensive tuning behind these apps precludes anyone but the largest organizations from deploying these solutions.

However, even for well-designed apps, the current state of ASR still limits the ability to expand self-service past very simple apps that are limited to only a few caller inputs. The danger of even moderately complex speech-enabled apps is the dreaded “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand. Could you please repeat that?” which usually drives the caller to press zero or repeat “Operator, operator!”

So should we give up all hope for speech recognition in the contact center unless you are a massive organization with plenty of cash?  Absolutely not! Human Assisted Understanding^TM, a technology developed by Interactions LLC, is an extremely potent and cost effective means to improve caller intent and expand speech-enabled self-service.  Variations of it have been available for over ten years, but the market uptake was not high until two or three years ago. Adaptive-Understanding^TM works by understanding an utterance’s confidence level, and will send an utterance that fails to meet the ASR’s ability to understand the utterance to a human along with a screen pop of most likely matches.

Over the history of the HAU^TM and similar offerings, several companies have used different role titles, but in business conversations, I tend to use “secret agent.”  The secret agent matches the utterance to the correct match and the application progresses without the caller knowing that a human was working behind the scene for several seconds. The human ear is not perfect, but it still is much better at disambiguation of speech than current speech recognition technology.  The NLU apps mentioned earlier require significant amounts of tuning to ensure the grammars contain enough words that will optimistically match almost all of callers’ possible utterances, but not too many words to allow misidentification of non-targeted words as the correct utterance.  Moreover, the tuning to keep the voices of two humans, or even just the caller’s utterances on track (to the IVR: “Tomorrow” immediately followed to the child/pet, “I said stop it!”) is a complex balancing act. It falls somewhere between science and art, and does not come cheap.

In contrast, HAU^TM is very accurate immediately upon deployment and when combined with additional Adaptive-Understanding^TM technology, it quickly and cost effectively tunes the ASR grammars. To be transparent, I have been a major proponent of the capabilities of HAU^TM since it first hit the market. Unveil Technologies first offered similar technology, but Microsoft acquired them in 2005 and pulled the offering from the market. At least two others attempted to replicate the technology, but for various reasons, the market did not adopt it.  Several years ago, Interactions LLC began offering HAU^TM, just as the market awoke to the understanding of what HAU^TM can do for them at a cost effective price point. Late last year, Interactions and AT&T completed a transaction where Interactions took possession of AT&T’s Watson natural language understanding technologies, along with several other assets. This acquisition bodes well for continuous improvement in use of Adaptive-Understanding^TM for tuning, as well as extension into additional customer contact channels.

Extremely successful hosted, speech-enabled virtual assistants with high ROIs are now within the reach of organizations big and small.  It is great news for callers, and organizations’ service and sales teams alike. Imagine hospitality reservations or the scheduling/changing/cancellation of home service appointments, perhaps full enrollment into health insurance programs; all accomplished 100% via voice virtual agents. To spark your imagination further, what if these voice channel virtual agents perform so well, they have higher NPS and customer satisfaction scores than when your own employees handle those calls?  I have been involved with implementation of the technology, and it truly is here, now.

For those of us old enough to remember, this is where Don Adams as secret agent Maxwell Smart in the Get Smart! TV series would likely remark: “Would you believe…..the old IVRs transforming into virtual assistants trick?”