Your FirstContact may not be human

By PETER GRIFFIN

Forget talking to cranky call centre agents or keying your way through clumsy telephone menus.

Computers from Australian voice recognition company VeCommerce, that can understand what you are saying, decipher your accent and be nice to you every time you call are appearing in the call centres of banks, betting outlets, taxi firms and Government departments.

New Zealand's first implementation of the technology, VeCab, will go live next week in the the call centre of Auckland-based Co-op Taxis, the country's biggest taxi firm, which handles 250,000 calls a month.

Co-op's customers will have the option of talking to the taxi dispatch computer over the telephone to carry out booking requests.

The customer's voice is converted into lines of text which are entered into fields in the taxi firm's dispatch management software.

Co-op chairman Robert van Heiningen said cost saving was the main reason for implementing the system. But the move would not lead to layoffs among the company's existing call centre staff of 75.

"We're expanding our call volume all the time, so this frees resources to provide better customer service. It won't lead to redundancies."

He said Co-op would aim to divert half of its call traffic through the automated system, which uses caller ID and location details provided by callers to assign a taxi to a pick up.

VeCommerce's managing director Paul Magee said voice recognition technology allowed a company to handle routine calls for between 10 and 20 per cent of the cost of employing a call centre agent to do the task, typically $A2 ($2.46) to $A3 ($3.7) a call.

"With human agents you queue up for a long time and when you finally get through you can have a range of experiences from very good to very bad, depending on the agent."

VeCommerce has installed its voice recognition software, FirstContact, for clients as varied as the Queensland TAB and the Australian Tax Office.

The software works with a speech recognition system supplied by Nuance and hosted on a Compaqserver.

In theory, every possible customer response is pre-entered into the server - thousands of place names and addresses in the case of Co-op.

VeCommerce has been working with computer telephony companies Dialogic and Aculab to develop its systems.

Mr Magee said a telephone port could be set up for on average $A25,000, and would pay for itself in eight to 12 months, in the case of a 24-hour call centre, as it removed the need to employ four shift workers.

Co-op expects to install around 20 ports, putting the cost of installation at around $200,000.

But the cost-cutting move of replacing call centre agents with artificial intelligence is being opposed by some quarters, in particular labour unions.

Gordon Webley, national organiser for Finsec, the financial sector union covering call centres, said: "The pitch that VeCommerce will be putting to customers is that the computers don't suffer from occupational overuse syndrome, they don't take tea breaks and no privacy issues arise.

"Service is no longer the focus, it's more to do with speed and output."

He said customers' unhappy experiences with automated systems such as those operated by Inland Revenue and Telecom were a clear sign that interaction with human operators was preferred.

The former taxi driver said this was particularly true of the taxi industry, where phone handlers had to have well-developed geographical knowledge.

"People are increasingly getting fed up with being answered by Machines and are more likely to migrate to services that provide human contact."

In January, telecommunications operator Telstra closed its call centre in South Australia's Mt Gambier, saying new voice recognition technology had entirely automated the tasks of 13 operators.

But VeCommerce maintains a more satisfying customer experience can be gained where routine calls are dealt with by the voice activation system and more complex inquiries are passed on to human operators.

Links


VeCommerce

Dialogic

Aculab

Nuance