This report by The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) surveys the adoption of self-service technologies delivered via kiosks, the Internet, mobile devices and the telephone and the many benefits to consumers, businesses and the economy. It also explores how advancements in technology such as Telephony (IVR), Internet,  Wireless networks and the availability of broadband Internet access, are leading to a growing number of self-service options and opportunities for companies to boost productivity. The report also helps makes the case for the government to embrace self-service technology to deliver services more efficiently and more conveniently to citizens.

A very good document for summer reading!

Executive Summary:

The past decade has witnessed a rapid growth in self service that allows consumers to take on the traditional role of a service worker in the provision of a service. Self service has long existed—think of placing a call by dialing a telephone instead of using a telephone operator or pressing a button in an elevator instead of using an elevator operator—but its importance has grown as advances in information technology (IT) have created many opportunities to leverage self-service technology for large gains in efficiency and convenience. Using computer kiosks, airline travelers check in to their fligths; on the Internet, consumers purchase products without speaking to a sales agent; and using a mobile phone customers check their bank balances and transfer funds. Self-service technology continues to become more efficient and more convenient, and, as a result, increasingly organizations, including businesses, non-profits and governments, are using self-service technology to operate more productively and to better serve their customers.

Download (from the source):

• Embracing the Self-Service Economy.pdf - 16 hits

Source: http://www.itif.org

Opus Research is featuring I6NET in an article by Dan Miller entitled “Version of VXI* for Asterisk Now Runs in Amazon EC2 Cloud”. Here is a brief snippet:

Earlier this month the the folks at i6Net Technologies showcased the release of a new version of its VXI* VoiceXML browser here. In a series of subsequent posts, the site offered pointers or suggestions regarding implementation of VXI* as a “plug in” for Asterisk-based IP-PBX’s including a set of virtual solutions where the browser is running in association with an instantiation of Asterisk 1.4 virtual PBX in Amazon’s EC2 (Elactic Compute Cloud) data centers [...]

Optimization of EC2 to boost the performance of Asterisk seems to have begun in earnest roughly a year ago. Adding speech-enabled IVR using i6net’s beta program for testing VXI based VoiceXML scripts in EC2 began the following August [...]

Source : Opus Research – VXI* for Asterisk now runs in Amazon EC2 Cloud

83% of Consumers Attribute Some Part of a Bad Customer Service Experience to Live Agent Interactions – Forrester, January 2010

Burlington, MA, January 13, 2010 – Nuance Communications, Inc. today announced the findings of a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Nuance titled, “Driving Consumer Engagement with Automated Telephone Customer Service.” The study revealed that consumers rate automated telephone customer service higher than live agents for certain straightforward interactions. In five out of ten posed scenarios, consumers preferred automated telephone customer service systems over live agent interactions for tasks like prescription refills (66% rated automation highly, compared with 52% for live agent), checking the status of a flight from a cell phone (61% versus 49%), checking account balances (59% versus 36%), store information requests (55% versus 37%), and tracking shipments (53% versus 47%).

The survey also revealed that automated telephone systems are an expected and accepted customer service channel with 82% of US online adults having used an automated touchtone or speech recognition system to contact customer service in the past 12 months. That figure trails behind only live agent interactions, with which 93% of consumers have engaged.

In the survey, consumers provided their level of interest in a variety of specific proactive notification options within five different industries. The aggregated results of the industry-specific questions show that a strong majority of consumers are interested in at least one proactive notification alert via their choice of email, voice message, or text message. Consumers were most open to notifications related to the travel industry (93%), which include such things as flight status updates and confirmation of reservations for flights, hotels, and car rentals. Eighty-eight percent of consumers were interested in notification from a financial services institution, with strong interest in transaction confirmations. With regard to health care, consumers strongly favored appointment reminders — something that could be adopted in a variety of other industries as well, such as utilities or professional services.

“The contact center plays a crucial role in retaining consumers, yet less than half of U.S. consumers report being satisfied with their customer service experiences,” said Micky Tsui, Nuance’s senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise. “As the research shows, there is a lot of room to improve customer service. Today’s enterprises have the opportunity to differentiate themselves by considering their customers’ needs and providing intuitive speech applications that improve customer loyalty at every touch point.”

Other key findings:

• Consumers’ satisfaction with customer service leaves a lot of room for improvement. Only 49% of U.S. online adults report being satisfied, very satisfied or extremely satisfied with companies’ customer service in general.
• Consumers who frequently contact customer service from a wireless phone are relatively more amenable to automated telephone customer service channels. About one-third (32%) of consumers regularly use a cell phone to contact customer service. The data indicates that in nearly all scenarios, mobile customer service users rate using automated telephone customer service systems higher than those consumers who do not regularly contact customer service using a cell phone. This is significant due to Forrester’s expectation that the number of wireless-only households will continue to grow, reaching 19% of all U.S. households by 2013.
• The 24-hour 7 days a week availability of automated telephone customer service is a key attribute in consumers’ minds. Seventy-seven percent of consumers pointed to 24-hour, seven days a week availability as a reason they value automated telephone customer service systems. Another 40% valued that they didn’t have to wait on hold for a live agent, while 31% cited the ability to obtain information quickly.
• Consumers today are overwhelmingly interested in proactive customer notifications across a variety of industries. For each of the five industries included in the survey, consumer interest in receiving some form of proactive notification was very strong, ranging from 80% (for cable television operators and telephone companies) to 93% (for travel-related companies).
• Opt-out, accurate software and logical call flows are essential components of a “great” automated speech-enabled customer interaction. Sixty-seven percent of consumers claimed that having the ability to speak to a live agent at any time is necessary in order to consider an automated speech-enabled customer service interaction a “great experience.” Systems can be enhanced by improving the accuracy of the software and employing thorough and logical call flows.

According to Forrester’s study, when it comes to evaluating a great experience with automated speech recognition customer service systems, two-thirds of consumers value having the ability to speak to a live agent at any time. Forty-two percent of consumers value the ability of the speech recognition system to understand them the first time a response is spoken, and 39% of consumers prefer not to have to repeat themselves. Similarly, when asked to identify what would improve speech recognition customer service experiences, the top choice (75%) of consumers was to offer the option of speaking with a live agent throughout the interaction. Being understood the first time (63%) and improving menus to direct callers to the appropriate destination (45%) round out the top three answer choices.

Nuance Communications, Inc.

Nuance is a leading provider of speech, imaging and customer interaction solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications, and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share, and use documents. Every day, millions of users and thousands of businesses experience Nuance’s proven applications. For more information, please visit www.nuance.com.

Source: Naunce News – Increased Automation

Interesting article from SpeechTechnology “With Hard Work Comes Prosperity”.
Published by Leonard Klie, posted Jan 10, 2010.

Sweet for Self-Service

The financial results seen by these companies are typical of the speech industry in general, which by and large weathered the financial storm much better than most other industries. And inside the speech industry, perhaps no segment fared better than the interactive voice response (IVR) market.

“2009 was a great year for self-service—both voice as well as Web-based” says Donna Fluss, president of DMG Consulting. “Even with the recession, there was a lot of investment in self-service IVR.”

Fluss expected the total IVR market to reach $2 billion by the end of the year.

Analyst firm Frost & Sullivan was also bullish on IVR. At the start of the year, when the economy seemed at its worst, the firm surveyed call center operators to gauge their interest in and plans for speech technologies during the next 12 to 18 months. At the time, 17 percent said all new applications they implemented would have speech only, 52 percent planned to adopt applications that combined speech and touch-tone, and 31 percent said they had no plans to adopt speech.

“We did that research at the beginning of the year, when things looked their darkest and the economy looked its bleakest, and there was still a significant uptake in speech planned,” says Keith Dawson, principal analyst for information and communications technologies at Frost & Sullivan. “There was a marked increase in the number of contact centers willing to front-end their customer-facing applications with speech.”

And though the final year-end numbers are not available, Dawson expects his firm’s predictions to hold true. “I do not anticipate any kind of change,” he says. “One of the results of the economic downturn will be an increase in [the use of] IVR technologies. The industry has gotten the message through that speech self-service is a real viable tool for reducing costs and improving relationships with customers.”

According to Drew Kraus, research vice president at Gartner, speech-enabled IVR vendors reaped the benefits of a major shift among their customers toward cost reductions. “It was very much a focus on how a speech IVR can reduce costs. They wanted to see how it can save them money,” he says.

Most of the money that filtered into the speech arena came in during the second half of the year, Kraus adds. “In the early going we saw a lot of planning [and] companies prioritizing what applications they would buy when they got the money. Toward the end of the year, the money started to loosen. We saw a lot more activity in speech, probably double what we saw in the first half of the year.”

A great part of that, as well, has to be from the increase in hosted offerings. Last year will go down in the annals of speech history as the time hosting took over the industry. For the first time, hosted solutions and managed services accounted for more than half of all deployments.

[...]

Source: http://www.speechtechmag.com/Articles/PrintArticle.aspx?ArticleID=60429

According to opusresearch; “Over the top” (OTT) is gaining momentum as the “term of art” for value-added Voice over IP (VoIP) transport networks. In rapid succession we’ve seen Avaya contemplating a relationship with Skype, Telefonica’s European wireless subsidiary 02 purchase JaJah and most recently Mark Plakias at Orange pointed me to this “Flash-to-VoIP” service, calling it an “OTT cocktail of Flash and Jingle-to-SIP gateway technology + carrier.”

The phrase “over-the-top” suggests a level of extravagance (think of “over the top” entertainment). Yet, during the past 10 years it has become synonymous with “cheap international calls”. In 2010, I expect OTT to return to form and refer to all sorts of value-added services and innovations, whose providers take advantage of those “cheap” or “free” minutes to take VoIP “beyond customary boundaries” (which happens to be one of the Dictionary.com definitions for “over the top”). Avaya and 02 are seeing the same trend, and we can expect a stream of acquisitions, partnerships and innovative service offerings that take incumbent carriers and traditional enterprise infrastructure providers over-the-top and outside their comfort zone. Case in point: BT with Ribbit.

By Dan Miller

Source: OpusReseach – 2010: Taking Recombinant Communications “Over The Top”

Asterisk, The Open Source PBX created by Mark Spencer from Digium has enjoyed rapid growth over the past 10 years. As a result, the company has been able to challenge larger, more established competitors to claim more of the market. With Asterisk software, companies can adopt corporate phone systems that are designed to be easier to customize and cost a fraction of traditional proprietary systems.

This is only the beginning of the change and it’s first time that Digium is reported by Gartner.  All Asterisk’s ecosystem members know that Asterisk is growing fast in the market, like other open source projects (firefox, apache, linux…) have already done.

Source: http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/vol6/article15/article15.html

Acording to ITU World Telecommunication: Mobile cellular has been the most rapidly adopted technology in history. Today it is the most popular and widespread personal technology on the planet, with an estimated 4.6 billion subscriptions globally by the end of 2009.

67% of people in the World have a mobile phone, this is the real critical mass to think more about speech self-service applications today… Growth of mobile phones users is twice faster than Internet fixed and mobile broadband users.

Source: ITU World in 2009: ICT Facts and Figures

According to opusresearch; Phone-based self-service has taken on new meaning as phones morph into multi-functional wireless devices and contact center functions are distributed throughout the globe. Conversational Access Technologies now involve asynchronous interaction among individuals using Web services over the phone lines. Adding the human touch to traditionally automated self-service activities gives companies the option to leverage existing staff and IT infrastructure or outsource operations to managed or hosted service providers.

By Dan Miller

This very interesting report includes a PDF summary to download.

Source: Foundations 2009: Voice Self-Service Meets Web 2.0

According to T3i Group‘s latest research, the global interactive voice response (IVR) market, which includes speech recognition, will grow to $514 million by 2013, up from an estimated $431 million this year, due in part to the growth in VoiceXML (VXML) technology.

The market for IVR is gaining new life due to a resurgence of self-service applications; the power of VXML to link Web applications to voice; and increasingly sophisticated outbound applications, including video on cellphones,” noted Ken Dolsky, Program Director for T3i Group’s InfoTrack for Converged Applications program. “Every vertical segment has some unique opportunities, and vendors are providing both solutions and guidance as to how IVR can improve the total customer experience with customer-pleasing applications to replace the stereotypical perception of IVR as only an endless loop menu.”

T3i Group segmented the analysis in this report by technology, applications and vertical industry.

Among the key findings:

* IVR  ports shipped, 95% will be VXML
95% of IVR ports shipped in 2013 will support VXML, compared with less than 75% today. VXML enables Web sites to offer the same text-based applications, such as order entry, with speech recognition.

* Top 3 IVR applications are self-services
The top three IVR applications are incoming call handling for contact centers; inbound self-service transactions; and outbound calling, such as appointment confirmations, collections reminders and repair notifications.

* Inbound calls to contact centers will annualy decrease nearly 10%
As vendors and enterprises integrate IVR into more comprehensive customer-care solutions, IVR ports shipped specifically for inbound calls to contact centers will decrease nearly 10% each year to 2013.

* Outbound IVR growth 12% annually through 2013
In comparison, IVR port growth will be driven by outbound applications at a rate of almost 12% annually through 2013.

* DTMF versus Speech Recognition evolution 1:2 by 2013
DTMF port shipments are declining, while shipments of speech ports, which recognize speech or convert text to speech, will hold an almost 2:1 advantage by 2013.

* TDM will be 10% compare to IP/SIP IVR ports
IP/SIP port shipments are growing strongly year over year; by 2013, only 10% of all IVR ports shipped will be TDM, compared with 42% today.

For more information about the InfoTrack for Converged Applications 2008 IVR Market Report, go to http://www.telecomweb.com/marketresearch

Source: http://www.telecomweb.com/aboutus/pressreleases/262963.html

Very interesting point of view from Nick Jones, member of the Gartner Blog Network about how we are not focusing on the critial elements of our effective comunication channels. Today, it’s really easy to think large screens mobile devices  are The best solution for any user’s interface but VoiceXML portals and advanced IVR services are a key factor for a smart communication evolution. Are you ready for small to be the new big?

We’re all fashion victims. Mobiles are basically fashion accessories with electronics inside. Technology itself has fashions, at the moment the pendulum has swung towards thin architectures and cloud services for example. But at some point thick clients will return to stride the techno-catwalk again, and we’ll all rediscover how nice it is to have a user interface that isn’t a browser.

Today the mobile industry is going through a ”big is beautiful” phase. The flagship devices like iPhone, TG01, and N97 have large screens, are chunky and heavy, and the manufacturers are trying to convince me that to be street credible I have to be seen carrying a barely pocketable PC clone. I guess to be politically correct I ought to avoid the term “chunky” and politely call them “plus sized” devices. Does that mean I have to call some of the new MIDs “double plus sized” devices I wonder?

However, the techno-fashion pendulum will swing as it always does. So the question I have for you is this: what will you do when small becomes the new big? When Apple creates the iPhone “shuffle” for example. Or maybe LG announces an even smaller V2 wristwatch phone. Many of my clients have spent a lot of time and money mobilising their web sites and developing applications aimed at devices such as iPhone in the belief that we’ll all be carrying big screens in our pockets. But the assumption that customers will be carrying a big screen, or even any form of screen isn’t something you (or they) should rely on. It’s time to start thinking about how you’ll do mobile banking, mobile commerce or whatever else you’re planning to do, on a device with a screen the size of a large postage stamp. Admittedly a high resolution postage stamp.

For example do you have a VoiceXML and IVR strategy? You’ll probably need one. And if you’re like AccuWeather or AP who developed widgets to sit on large home screens, have you wondered what you’ll do on devices that have a tiny home screen, or maybe no spare screen real estate at all? The answers to these sorts of questions will imply a major re-think of mobile application architecture and interaction; perhaps a move to proactive contextual notification for example. Or maybe it’s time to learn from devices like the Ambient Orb which shows how far you can go with what’s effectively a single pixel display. This would also be a good time to hire a few outstanding mobile UI designers just so you’re ready to make the best possible use of every microscopic pixel on tomorrow’s tiny devices.

Reference:
http://blogs.gartner.com/nick_jones/2009/07/12/are-you-ready-for-small-to-be-the-new-big/