Chapter One. On Telephones, Touchtones, and Business Needs

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel.

” RALPH WALDO EMERSON

There are three things in speech that ought to be considered before some things are spoken ”the manner, the place and the time.

” ROBERT SOUTHEY

Social-psychological research has shown that people treat media the same way as they treat other people. The moment a speech-recognition system answers and asks a caller a question, the speech system becomes a social actor. ^[1] This interaction between computer and human will influence the way each caller feels about that developing relationship. And it is through this constructed , human-machine dialogue that the company has the opportunity to create its "Noble Voice": a single voice to handle all issues with elegance , all complaints with genuine concern, and to treat all people ”regardless of race, sex, age, perceived intelligence, or accent ”equally. A voice to serve 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, requiring no vacation or time off. A voice, that when it fails to aid the caller with their task, can still treat them elegantly, and with egalitarian politeness.

^[1] Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass, The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

To construct this Noble Voice in a way to provide callers with a positive experience, we have to understand some of the underlying aspects of society, technology, communication, and commerce.

The telephone has become indispensable for both personal and business communication. It's easy to understand why. The telephone offers an immediacy that's essential in today's world; it is extraordinarily intuitive and easy to use; and as the cost of long-distance calling has dropped and wireless technology has proliferated, it has never been more accessible.

For the first 65 years after Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, people could only communicate over the phone with other people. With the development of touchtone systems in 1941 by Bell System, we gained the ability to communicate over the phone with computers by pressing keys on the telephone keypad. By the 1970s many companies had begun to use this technology to automate aspects of their call centers. More recently, speech-recognition software has enabled us to interact with computers using only our voices. Speech recognition is a technology that enables a computer to identify and act upon what a person has said. And unlike personal computer speech-recognition software, which typically is used by a single person to dictate letters to a computer, telephony-based speech-recognition software enables thousands of people, simultaneously , to use any cellular or landline phone to contact a company and have a simple conversation about a particular subject. With telephone-based speech recognition systems customers can contact companies to retrieve flight information, book tickets for events, and even trade stocks over the phone.

Many companies now use the phone to market their brand identities, sell more products and services to their existing customers, and provide customers with access to information when they're traveling. People can call their bank and get immediate, up-to-date checking account and credit-card balance information without having to talk to someone. As voice and data networks converge, the range of services that can be delivered over the phone continues to grow. An increasing number of companies deliver their services over the phone at low cost, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, every day of the year using automation techniques. The increasing sophistication of speech-recognition technology, coupled with the universal appeal of the telephone, has opened up a new world of business opportunities for companies of all kinds.

According to Epoch Partners, Inc. and International Data Corporation (IDC), companies made Customer Relationship Management (CRM) a $6.6 billion business in 2000 as they integrated their call centers, corporate databases, and computer systems into a coherent whole to attract and retain customers. To achieve the full potential of CRM, companies need to fully leverage the power of the telephone. With that power, they can better retain the loyalty of their existing customers, reach new customers, generate advertising revenue, save money, and better support and build their brands. Touchtone systems achieve some of these objectives. Speech-recognition technology can be used to achieve all of them.