The Web’s next phase: Voice Commerce for Customer Self-care & Full Web Transactions

By: Stephen Avalone, VP of Marketing, NetByTel
10/30/2001

Speech technology has helped create exciting new frontiers for call centers and the Web. As the speech technology market begins to consolidate we see three primary segments of “voice services” emerging. Voice portals, as they’re known, concentrate on consumer services such as access by telephone to information like e-mail, stock quotes, weather and horoscopes. Other voice companies focus on enterprise applications such as corporate intranets to voice-enable field and sales force automation applications. But so far the most successful adoption of speech recognition-based technology is voice commerce – the ability to perform actual Web transactions – such as purchasing products and tracking the order in real time – by speaking into any telephone.
What’s different about voice commerce? Voice commerce combines an automatic speech recognition interface, text-to-speech technology and extensible markup language (XML) to deliver a turnkey solution to businesses looking to improve their customer service while dramatically reducing costs. It’s a step beyond traditional interactive voice response (IVR) and Internet voice portals because it integrates data across all channels. When the call is finished, the online transaction is also finished, just as if the user was at the Web site typing and clicking with the mouse. To IT directors and call center managers, the result looks the same, which means they don't have to duplicate their efforts minding different systems that serve the same purpose. With true integration of information across databases, the Web and phones, any company can invite the 1.3 billion telephone users worldwide to buy or seek self-service from their Web sites and back-end systems.

Voice commerce opens the door to full real-time e-commerce by phone, and by the same token ushers call centers into the next phase of customer relationship management (CRM) – advanced speech recognition for customer self care. Research suggests that touch-tone IVR has mostly failed to fill the automation gap. For example, according to the Frost & Sullivan industry report, “Speech Over Touchtone in the Interactive Voice Response Market” (published 2000), about 50 percent of all callers hang up or press zero when confronted with touch-tone automation. Clearly, removing human interaction completely is not an answer. And yet, applying high-quality automation to the appropriate inquires, organizations free human resources for these complex interactions. What's more, the telephone is still one of the main contact channels and the most cost effective. The same Frost & Sullivan research also shows that a large percentage of the 50 percent who reject conventional IVR will attempt to complete the transaction using advanced speech recognition. That's what voice commerce is banking on. In the final analysis, automation has to enhance customer service, not hinder or replace it.

One catalyst for effective customer self-service confronts retail call centers in particular; the “unsatisfiable customer.” Once upon a time, store prices included healthy margins that paid for well-staffed stores and call centers. Customer service was good because the margins could support it. E-commerce turned the tables, with unlimited product selection and lower prices. However, the slimmer margins meant e-tailers could no longer provide such high levels of customer service.

Voice commerce promises to satisfy these new high-maintenance customers who want great service, low prices and large selections. Voice commerce extends the telephone to the new culture of customer self-care that e-commerce has created, where many consumers find answers to their own queries on company Web sites. For example, voice commerce lets customers browse product selections, place an order, and track that order's changing status by speaking to the retailer's web-based online systems, over the telephone. Result? Current implementations are actively saving more than 80 percent of the cost of live representatives.

The year 2001 may not look - or sound - like 2001, A Space Odyssey. But it is the year that using your voice to conduct commerce transactions and access effective self-service from the Internet finally became viable for customer service and prudent business.

E-commerce has proven that many consumers are willing to seek solutions to their problems via self-service technologies. Voice commerce blends friendly, advanced speech recognition with online self-service techniques to automate routine customer inquires and purchases, catalog and store location requests, order status calls and product ordering. Customers used to using the Web find it an easy jump to doing the same things by speaking into a phone.

Businesses need a cost-effective, no-fuss way to provide customer self care and to transform Web commerce into voice commerce without changing existing IT infrastructure. But what business and IT implementation strategies will win out for voice commerce? Voice Commerce solutions that extend entire Web sites to phone users without changing existing infrastructure seem to be in the lead.

Where we go from there is ... anybody's call.