One of the most pressing challenges for today's contact centre is the ability to deliver a more intuitive and personalised level of customer service. Whilst speech analytics is a relatively new innovation being used by contact centres, analysis of speech self-service applications provides almost identical benefits and is an integral part of their success. Contact Centres that have implemented well designed speech recognition self-services should have access to a potentially vast array of on-tap customer intelligence that can be leveraged to enhance their customer's speech self-service experience. To develop this thought a bit further, here's just some typical metrics and pointers that can be used with a view to enhancing your speech recognition services and to optimise your customers' speech self-service experience over time:

1.    Caller Frequency and Repeat Usage

Why not look at how many unique callers use the system? How many of these people call repeatedly? How often do they call? Whilst you may consider this quite a rudimentary measure, you may well be surprised at the outcome. For instance, you might learn that a minority of your customers are accounting for a very a large proportion of your call traffic. Instead of focussing a significant part of your effort attracting new callers to the service or increasing usage from light users who may prefer to self-serve from other channels, it may make better sense to concentrate on enhancing the service for high end users.

On the flip side, analyses of more experienced users may shed light on the more popular elements of the service that may not be commonly known by light users - this could certainly help to inform and personalise marketing activity to stimulate infrequent users or to attract new customers to the service.

2.    Going One Step Further - Identifying Opportunities

By consistently tracking your speech service, it is possible to identify exactly what callers are using the service for and perhaps more crucially - what the service doesn't provide that the caller frequently requests. Analysing why callers exit the service can be a useful mechanism for identifying potential enhancements and add-ons to the service that will encourage repeat usage and show customers that the system is being consistently enhanced and updated over time.

Furthermore, by analysing how callers use the service - it is possible to work out which features are more popular and then to make those features more prominent and easier to reach. For instance - at peak times or seasonal periods such as Christmas, callers may be more likely to make a transaction (e.g. pay a bill, make a booking, buy an item) versus quieter periods when they may be simply want to listen to information or 'browse' a service. It follows that by analysing caller behaviour patterns over different periods, the service call flow could be altered to anticipate caller behaviour during these times.

3.    Personalising the caller experience

This is one of the most powerful aspects to speech recognition technology and is certainly a capability that will become more developed as organisations seek to provide a more sophisticated and enhanced customer service experience. For instance, with recent advances in speech recognition technology, it is possible to personalise speech services by anticipating a customer's service habits or calling behaviour over time. This provides for a faster, efficient and more intuitive self-service experience that is sure to impress customers and keep them coming back for more. Furthermore, by analysing 'out of vocabulary' or unexpected phrases (OOV), it is possible to continuously refine and extend your database of speech utterances within the recognition service, providing callers with a more "colloquial" and intuitive speech experience over time.

4.    Record, Track, and then Refine, Refine, Refine

As with most other technologies, the more time you invest in enhancing your speech services, the more rewards you will reap in terms of introducing new functionality, enhancing vocabulary, introducing personalisation whilst sustaining and growing customer usage.

For more information on how to get the most from your speech services email Ashley at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it