Businesses use analytics technology to extract information from customer usage recordings and logs to gain insight about interactive systems and to identify trouble spots and opportunities in user interactions. In this session, financial services firms describe how they use analytics to identify customer behavior and experience so they can improve customer treatment and, ultimately, increase their financial benefit.

This presentation will explain how Bank of America examines customer experiences across multiple channels (IVR, agent, Web, etc.) to identify the exact events resulting in customer confusion and frustration. Learn how Bank of America uses this information to prioritize enhancements that maximize user adoption and customer retention.

A TTS based solution for ATM equipments will be presented in this session. This solution aims to allow blind customers (or with low vision), to use ATM machines for banking transactions as withdraws, balance etc. This multi-platform solution was designed to support many languages and to be customized with low impact of development in the Bank’s transactional applications.

Consumer packaged goods companies and retailers rely on speech technology in a variety of ways. This session will focus on two: warehousing and customer self-service solutions. One presentation will feature Coca-Cola’s warehouse voice-picking system, which, based on inexpensive IP phones and network-based speech recognition, has yielded significant cost reductions. The second presentation will explain how human guides, working in the background, have improved service for a retail self-service application.

Coca-Cola Enterprises created the first-ever deployment of warehouse voice-picking based on inexpensive IP phones and network-based speech recognition. The results? Significant reductions in per-device costs and total cost of ownership. This presentation will provide insights into what drove this innovation, the results achieved, and future plans to leverage speech capabilities on a services-oriented architecture (SOA) basis throughout the company.

The Spiegel call center has replaced the traditional menu-driven touchtone approach to receiving and routing calls with guided self-service. This session takes an up-close look at the new solution, which enables a behind-the-scenes human guide to monitor and assist four or more simultaneous calls, resulting in a better caller experience with reduced ordering and customer service costs.

Speech technology is being used in healthcare for more than routine appointment setting and medical dictation. The first case study in this session shows how a natural language VUI enables bidirectional access to the entire text-based component of electronic medical records. The second presentation highlights how healthcare companies can use speech technology for outbound calls that replace live nurse calls.

ICIPS is an ongoing R&D project at the UCLA Medical Center. Its main objective is to provide bidirectional access to the entire text-based component of the electronic medical records using a natural language VUI. Learn how this application was designed, implemented, and deployed, and how it impacts the operation of a medical center. This presentation will summarize the strengths and weaknesses of the VUI as compared to an existing GUI.

Current healthcare protocols often require regular patient follow-up after a hospital discharge or as part of a clinical study. Typically, doctors rely on nurses to call patients to monitor recovery or to gather data for statistical analysis. These calls are expensive and time consuming compared to an IVR application that can replace nurse calls. Automated calls were found to be just as effective as live nurse calls and had additional benefits—more consistent, reliable calls were possible. This presentation will discuss the study protocol and the results of the trial. Virtual nurse calls now are a proven, winning strategy for clinical studies and patient care.

A clear sign that speech has hit the mainstream is when late technology adopters, such as governments and utility companies, are implementing speech solutions. The first case study in this session will describe the development and deployment of a new speech application to provide customer self-service to its San Francisco residents. The second case study discusses why NSTAR chose speech to replace the previous menu structure, integrating with other call center technologies, the importance of load and performance testing and customer reaction.

The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission will describe the development and deployment of the new speech application to provide customer self-service to its San Francisco customers. The goals of the new system are to increase use of automated offerings, free up agents to assist callers that can only be assisted by a live agent, save agent transfer calls for customers really needing assistance with an easy tool for self-service and, to ensure that a live person is always reachable.

In this presentation, attendees will learn: why NSTAR chose speech technology to replace the existing menu structure, how the interoperability with other call center technologies affected the implementation, how load and performance testing ensured a successful implementation, and what reaction customers had to the new system. NSTAR’s telecommunications team learned many lessons during the rollout of the project on both a business and technology level. Getting management’s commitment early in the process and reviewing existing technology for any interoperability issues are two of lessons learned we will share during this presentation.

Telecommunication companies face a number of issues in applications that provide services to customers. The first presentation evaluates alternative designs for a technical support application. The other two presentations describe how speaker verification can minimize security and privacy issues.

Verizon FiOS TV wanted to determine the best design for a natural language question and back-off menu for a technical support application. The company created three different approaches to challenge the then existing design. All four were deployed in a limited production release and evaluated based on two metrics: number of callers successfully matching their need to a technical support topic and automation rate. One of the designs was a clear winner, improving both accuracy and automation by 10 percent. The characteristics of the winning design will be presented.

Leaco is a telecommunications services provider that supplies wireless, wireline, and Internet services to approximately 175,000 bilingual and monolingual customers in Southeastern New Mexico. In November 2007, Leaco began rolling out customer-facing speaker-verification services to 12,000 of its customers. The system is designed to address the following issues:
• Improve the customer experience;
• Regulatory compliance (with CPNI);
• Customer concern about security; and
• Brand differentiation.

Bell Canada is the largest telecommunications services provider in Canada. It has rolled out a nationwide, customer-facing system, starting with residential wireline and wireless customers. By the start of 2008, Bell Canada had enrolled 500,000 customers. The company chose speaker verification for the following reasons:
• Secure the privacy of customer data;
• Make privacy more convenient; and
• Reduce the average length of call-center calls.

Speech technology is increasingly being used in the automobile. The first case study in this session will show how a speech-enabled, in-vehicle device can read email and text messages aloud and enable users to instantly respond by voice. This session’s second case study will reveal how customers can use their mobile phones to retrieve location and current real-time parking availability at parking facilities; make parking reservations at a facility; pay for parking; and provision a new user account and provide outbound informational alerts.

A new, state-of-the-art, speech-enabled in-vehicle device exists that not only reads email and text messages aloud, but enables you to instantly respond to them by voice. Generated speech notifies drivers with timely information about phone calls, calendar appointments, and other potentially distracting mobile phone events. The following challenges will be covered: in-vehicle voice interfaces require extremely careful design and focus around the user's primary task—driving, and flexibility, personalization, and appropriateness of dialogue content are important in a VUI used on a daily basis.

ParkingCarma needed a scalable and safe way to enable its customers to access its services while driving. Companies should be able to perform the following functions in as cost-effective and convenient manner possible through a speech enabled application over a mobile phone: search for and get the location and current real-time parking availability at parking facilities, make a reservation for parking at a facility, pay for parking at a facility, and provision a new user account and provide outbound informational alerts. The system also had to be designed to take into account the harsh noise environment inside of cars and parking facilities.

Financial services and insurance companies are turning to speech technology for help in meeting stringent security, privacy, and compliance demands. The first case study will show how a financial services company uses a real-time speech solution that recognizes callers who typically call for specific reasons and proactively engages in data-driven dialogues to offer information they usually request. The second case study will highlight how an insurance company provides members with prompt access to information using speech technology, which helped to cut costs, reduce call volumes, and maintain a high level of customer satisfaction.

Wachovia uses a real-time, rules-based, customer-segment-driven decisioning solution that recognizes callers who typically call for specific reasons and proactively engages in data-driven dialogues to offer information they usually request. This approach gives the customer information faster and bolsters IVR containment while simultaneously improving the customer experience. This session will recap the approach, solution, and current results, allowing attendees to learn more about this data-driven decisioning technology and how the IVR can come full circle in providing personal treatment.

Health Net realized cost savings between $2.3 million and $4.4 million annually using speech technology to automate processes, reduce call volumes, and maintain a high level of customer satisfaction. This session will discuss how speech technology can help healthcare providers balance cost effectiveness and service goals, while providing members with prompt access to information and how to enhance security, privacy, and HIPAA compliance using voiceprint identification.

Speech applications are a driving force in defining the customer care experience. Designing and deploying automated speech solutions from the customer’s point of view is a critical factor for competitive advantage. Learn the value from using speech to optimize your customer interactions to drive higher business performance, increase automation rates and improve your customer satisfaction. This session will show the value of understanding your speech applications and delivering a rewarding customer experience.

OrderCatcher is a cost-effective self-service speech application for Chinese and Pizza take-out. Learn whycustomers choose speech self-service, the business problem they wanted speech self-service to solve, how they developed their requirements for the speech self-service application and what advice they would give to a company considering speech self-service to take their fast food orders over the phone.

Financial services firms use speech analytics to identify customer behavior and experience to improve customer treatment and ultimately increase financial benefit. As a result, it can answer these questions: What is actually driving calls into the contact center? Which call types could be handled by self-service? How prevalent are certain agent behaviors? Which agents need additional training? What is driving repeat calls and inappropriate transfers? How can I improve first-call resolution and increase the quality of the customer experience? This insight enables financial services firms to set improvement priorities on facts and to maximize user adoption and customer retention. Allen will discuss how with speech analytics, Capital One was able to achieve quantifiable benefits in the following areas, resulting in multi-million dollar savings: customer experience, sales effectiveness, process improvement, and first call resolution.