Keys to Being a Successful Speech Application Provider
To build a successful telephony-based speech application, there are 4 main parts to the process which follows the plan-do-check-act model, (also known as the Deming cycle for continuous improvement) pretty closely.
- Plan-Design speech applications based on the problem being solved.
-Understand who the users of the application will be and what they will be looking to accomplish
-Gather the data required to satisfy users’ needs
-Create a dialog that will maximize success for the caller, with the application.
- Do-Build the applications
-Create the applications following the design, to optimize for caller participation and success
-Enable the infrastructure to support the application
- Check-Analyze caller success with the applications- Determine/verify the efficacy of the applications and help improve them
-Support the applications for the life of the application
- Act-Be proactive in maintaining a customer partner relationship
-Respond to changes in caller success
-Provide recommendations for additional caller and agent benefits
Parlance does this process for each and every customer because every customer is unique and has a different set of business requirements. Even health systems have drastic variations from one hospital to another. In fact, our motto for hospitals is, “If you’ve seen one hospital…you’ve seen one hospital.”
Taking the time to analyze the issues, finding the areas where using speech for automation will be most effective, and looking for the data that will support the application when it’s in use, is only the first step. Steps 2 and 3, building and analyzing the application, are iterative. Caller behavior is the main indicator of your speech application success and is the main basis for making changes to optimize the application. Parlance listens to many thousands of caller utterances to help understand how the application is working and to make recommendations for improvement. Parlance speech applications are not set-it-and-forget-it applications, as the data, the business and caller needs are constantly changing along with the needs of the callers.
Finally, including customers as partners in development and optimization creates long-term, lasting relationships. You can never guarantee that there will be no bugs or problems. The only thing you can guarantee is that when there are problems you will work to get them resolved. Your customers must have confidence that you will always work quickly to resolve issues and hang in there with them for the life of the application.
We are a managed service and that differentiates us from all other speech attendant and speech-enabled IVR products.
- The level of attention we provide during the discovery, design, build, and implementation periods is sustained over the life of the service
- Parlance monitors application performance and caller success over the life of the application and constantly makes improvements
- The knowledge we gain from each client engagement is applied to improve results across all our client engagements
- Parlance is a subscription to results, not a software purchase
- We guarantee ROI!
By Mindy Garber
