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Customer, Enterprise and Vendor Alignment on Speech Technology

SpeechTek in New York City last week saw relatively good traffic given the economy. It was likely helped by the fact that the organizers collapsed what had been two annual shows (one on the West and one on the East coast) into one and Nuance cancelled its annual end user meeting-Conversations--sending anyone with a little speech-related trade show budget to New York last week.One of the sessions I made a point of attending was a read-out of primary research conducted by Dimension Data, in collaboration with Cisco and Tellme. In its third year, the Alignment Index for Speech Self-Service survey aims to compare and measure consumer, vendor and enterprise perceptions of speech systems. Specifically, the research seeks to identify differences in perceptions and track levels of alignment among the three groups over time. It collects data on global consumer behaviors and attitudes toward speech solutions--almost 2,000 consumers across six countries (USA, Canada, UK, France, Germany and Australia). Consumers are asked a set of questions and then the other two groups asked how they think consumers would respond to those questions.

Some of the interesting findings for specific questions are as follows:

*What do you think is the main reason organizations provide automated services within their contact centers? Consumers are very pragmatic about automated services and believe they are installed primarily as part of a money-saving initiative. Vendors and consumers are fairly well aligned on this issue. Enterprises, however, see "Improvement in Service" as a more significant motivator than do either consumers or vendors. This is one of the measures where enterprises and vendors are least aligned. The implication for vendors is to make sure that they weave together both the cost saving and improvement in customer experience messages as they position their solutions with businesses.

* How often would you prefer to use a speech recognition system rather than a touchtone system? On a six-point scale from "most of the time" to "as little as possible," consumers reply "as little as possible" 41% of the time. From an alignment perspective, enterprises thought consumers would answer that just 15% and speech technology vendors believed consumers would say that just 3% of the time. Clearly vendors and businesses believe their speech applications to be more user-friendly than consumers find them to be.

One of the other findings I'd like to highlight comes from the demographic data of the enterprise users surveyed. Of the almost 300 enterprise participants (30% having more than 500 seats in their contact centers), over half the companies have been using speech in their centers for over 3 years. Studies like this benefit the industry by seeking to understand what consumers do and do not like about how the technology is deployed.