Voxeo Talks

Providing best-in-class IVR technology is a science, but deciding on the right messages and voice for your new IVR system is more of an art. After you’ve customized your IVR script with the right message, the next step you should take is to give your system a distinct voice that will resonate with your customers and set the tone for your message and your brand image.

To find the right voice for your message, you can develop a persona by considering your customers’ demographics and intent:

Demographics: You probably already have an extensive understanding of the demographics of your customer base. You’ll want to keep this broadly in mind – are your customers geographically distributed or does most of your business come from one country or region? Is there a particular age range or gender that defines most of your customer base? This can help you make decisions about language, dialect and age or gender of the IVR voice.

Intent: Depending on the function of your IVR, the appropriate tone of voice may be very different. An outbound IVR system that makes notifications of service outages would have a more serious and mature tone than an IVR that provided customer service functions for a retailer with a youthful audience, for example.

Once you understand this information, you are ready to put together a persona for your IVR, so that you can select the distinct voice that both reflects your brand, and will be appropriately received by your customers when they are interacting with the system. Customers will appreciate that your company has a voice they can identify with, allowing you to be sure that you are delivering your message and providing for their needs in the best way possible.

At Voxeo, we’ve partnered with GMVoices – the world’s largest producer of professionally-recorded voice prompts for automated technologies – to provide male and female voices in over 100 languages and dialects from which an on-brand, professionally produced dialog can be recorded and integrated into your IVR.

Hear a demo of a conversation with an IVR agent for an insurance company, with a voice chosen to be friendly, helpful and reassuring:

Visit our website to get more info on IVR prompt recording and more information on optimizing your Voxeo IVR with high-quality custom voice prompts from GMVoices.

At our recent Voxeo Customer Summit 2010, Dan Burnett, our Director of Speech Technologies, gave a presentation on the current best practices with regard to speech technology. Dan has some great stats and great pointers to what you should be thinking about when you look at how to improve your speech-enabled application. You can check out the slides on SlideShare:

Last minute shopping trips, family gatherings, and out-of-town visitors. All contribute to the holiday rush that puts drivers in a less-than-cheery mood. This season avoid traffic backups and other problem areas with 511.

511 is the nationally designated abbreviated dialing code for real-time travel information. Callers can get instant updates on road construction, traffic, weather conditions, and more. It’s a free service that’s currently available to more than 70% of the U.S. population. 511 leverages interactive voice response (IVR) and speech recognition to provide drivers with anytime, “hands-free” access to information. If you find yourself in a jam this holiday season or want an update before hitting the road, give 511 a call. 

Voxeo partner, PBS&J, delivers Voxeo-powered 511 systems in Virginia and North Carolina. PBS&J provides reliable 511 IVR services – even during the holidays when traffic and weather conditions trigger huge fluctuations in call volume. The Voxeo-powered solution ensures PBS&J clients have high availability, on-demand scalability, and cost-effective bursting during usage spikes. Learn more about 511, PBS&J, and Voxeo in our new case study.

Interested in learning about the advantages of hosted speech solutions versus on-premise solutions? Or why you should or shouldn’t have to choose? Want to understand the pros and cons of pushing voice applications out “into the cloud”? If so, please join us today at 2pm US Eastern time for a free webinar hosted by Speech Tech Magazine and including speakers from Voxeo, Angel.com, Contact Solutions and Nuance Communications. To sign up, please go to this URL:

http://www.speechtechmag.com/webinars/roundtable/12nov2009/vox2

Industry analyst Daniel Hong from Ovum (formerly Datamonitor and author of Datamonitor’s IVR short list report) will start the session with a market overview and the whole event is hosted by Speech Tech Magazine’s David Myron. Key questions to be discussed include:

• How the incentives built into a hosted agreement impact the customer’s long-term results;
• How the arrangement should be set up for you to realize maximum savings;
• The capabilities to look for when selecting a provider;
• The role of monitoring, reporting, and tuning;
• The role of caller behavior analysis;
• The impact of service-level agreements on performance, availability, and caller experience;
• The limitations when handling different interaction types, such as touch-tone, mobile, speech, and authentication/verification; and
• Integration with customer and third-party data/solutions to meet unique call requirements.

It should be an interesting collection of viewpoints given the mix of vendors. Again, it’s free, so please feel free to sign up and join us at 2pm US Eastern, 11am US Pacific. The session will also be archived for later viewing.

Over a past weekend I found myself in my local “big box” home improvement store (name removed to protect the guilty ) trying to find a specific part – a replacement switch for a ceiling fan. I had looked in all the places that were “obvious” to me… but couldn’t find it. I found myself wandering among the aisles looking for a staff person – but of course with it being a weekend the store was quite busy and no available staff could be found. My frustration level (and blood pressure) kept increasing as I found myself wasting more time looking for someone to help me find this part.

In that one moment, I completely understood the goal of Aisle411.

The concept is simple… pick up your phone, dial a number, ask where the product is and find out specifically where in the store it is located. No wasting time running around looking for an employee… no wandering around the aisles cursing… just getting right to where the product is and being able to keep on going. (Side benefit, I guess, of lower blood pressure!)

Now obviously there is a degree of coordination required between the big box retailer and the Aisle411 service. The Aisle411 folks need to be sure they have the latest and greatest inventory map loaded in – otherwise you’d get awfully frustrated with their service if it told you where something was and it turned out not to be there. But that’s their goal… and they have started out now with a St. Louis-area Ace Hardware and a Price Cutter grocery store in Springfield, Missouri. They indicate on their store locator page that they will be launching in more stores in the time ahead. (They also posted a video talking more about the service.)

There are a couple of interesting dimensions to this:

• You could use this service in advance of being at the store to know exactly where you need to go. You could call from home or on the way in (assuming that is allowed in your state).
• It’s pretty cool to me on a technological level that the advances we have in communications technology allow you to find out information about your local store by querying a global service located out in the cloud.

Obviously we’ll see in the time ahead how well these initial installations go and how widely the Aisle411 technology gets adopted, but as an individual consumer I can say that I’d personally like to see this available as an option. In the case of my spare part I was seeking, I eventually did find someone in another department who was able to point me to the right location, but having a quick way to call would have saved me a good bit of wasted time.

Note: Aisle411 is a Voxeo customer, but that’s not why I’m writing about them… I just think the service is a great idea.

As noted on our SpeechTEK 2009 page, our Dr. Dan Burnett gave a talk on August 24, 2009, on the topic of “Optimizing Speech Recognizer Rejection Thresholds“. His slides are now available from our SlideShare account:

Technorati Tags: speech, speechtek, voxeo, conferences, slides, danburnett

As I mentioned previously, I (Dan York) participated in a webinar sponsored by Speech Technology Magazine back on November 13th where several of us from different vendors participated in a roundtable discussion of hosted speech solutions. The archive of that webinar is now available for viewing. Here’s the abstract:

BUSINESS VIEWPOINT: HOSTED SPEECH SOLUTIONS Join Speech Technology magazine as we deliver our first live round-table Web event, featuring four hosted speech solution providers. Executives from Angel.com, Convergys, Tellme, and Voxeo will share their views on different hosted models, benefits to customers, value-added services, and much more. This Web event is one that should not be missed!

It was a fun event to do and I think you’ll find some of the questions and answers quite interesting and informative. I look forward to doing some more of these events in the future.

If you have any questions coming out of what you hear there, please feel free to leave them as comments to this blog post – or email me directly.

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider:

• subscribing to the RSS feed for this blog;

• subscribing to the RSS feed for all of of our blogs;
• subscribing via email to the updates from all of our blogs; or
• following us on Twitter.

Thank you.

Technorati Tags: speech, speech tech magazine, voxeo, angel, tellme, convergys, hosted ivr, ivr, voicexml