Voice Design Tools Get a Redesign of Their Own
Genesys acquired SpeechStorm at the end of 2015, providing it with a number of omnichannel tools. It followed that up with partnerships with other companies with a variety of voice and related tools, including DialogTech, Virtual Hold Technologies, Interactions, Avtex, AudioCodes, and Microsoft. Its most most significant move, though, was the acquisition of Interactive Intelligence for $1.4 billion in mid-2016.
“We’ve been working to pull together the different platforms and tools we’ve gotten from our acquisitions,” says Dave Pelland, director of UX innovation and design at Genesys.
With the acquisitions complete, at least for the time being, Genesys is pulling together engineers and other experts from the acquired companies to provide designers with easy-to-use tools that can be pooled into the Genesys App Automation Platform (GAAP)—formerly the SpeechStorm Framework—a complete, personalized, contextual, and integrated environment to design, configure, test, deploy, and manage IVR applications on the Genesys Voice Platform (GVP).
That same thinking was the driving force behind Genesys’s late March launch of three new customer experience solutions—PureCloud, PureConnect, and PureEngage, all based on intellectual property it gained from Interactive Intelligence.
According to the company, PureCloud is a cloud-based customer engagement and employee collaboration solution that prioritizes ease of use and speed of deployment. It includes call, chat, and video capabilities, as well as the ability to integrate with Salesforce.com, Zendesk, and other applications.
PureConnect is a multichannel engagement solution aimed at medium to large organizations and is available both on premises and in the cloud. It aims to simplify customer relationships with call, email, chat, and text capabilities and includes self-service and proactive outreach features.
PureEngage is a customer engagement suite available both on premises and in the cloud. It features real-time contextual journey and intelligent routing capabilities.
Though the tools are designed to be easier to use than those in the past, Genesys also offers training for IVR users to get the most out of GAAP. The training, typically offered in four-week sessions, includes details on integrations and attached data, key functional elements, the initial customer experience, and personalization.
“A lot of what the industry does is build tools for our users,” Pelland says. The goal now is to have much of the speech technology intelligence in the tools themselves so business users can work with them without needing to understand all of the intricacies of speech science, he adds.
Aspect Software is seeing more of its customers wanting omnichannel capabilities as well.
Aspect’s Customer Experience Platform (CXP) allows developers to create an integrated omnichannel customer experience on IVR, mobile web, and various text and messaging channels, including not just the basic SMS platforms but also Facebook Messenger, Twitter, and web chat, among others.
CXP’s Continuity Server allows session context to persist across multiple customer touch points, providing a seamless experience when switching channels and when moving from automated dialogues to an agent.
CXP leverages the latest speech recognition and text-to-speech engines as well as voice biometrics and provides comprehensive methods for speech recognition tuning. More recently, Aspect added its own natural language understanding (NLU) solution to the platform and now allows developers to build automated dialogues using natural speech on all text-like channels.
Going forward, Aspect will further strengthen its NLU capabilities and make it easier to build intelligent bots that support a conversational user experience. Also, Aspect is focused on further integration of self-service with its cloud-based contact center platform.
Continued Developments Ahead
Companies will be further developing their voice design capabilities through the rest of the year, looking to expand not only into the cloud, but also into personal voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home. Already, developers have created about 7,000 skills (Amazon’s name for third-party voice-enabled apps) for Alexa.
According to VoxGen’s Robinson, Amazon’s Alexa—the brains behind Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, Tap, and Fire TV—and competing devices offer better speech-enabled interactions than the phone because they were designed purely with such capabilities in mind.
Between Alexa and Google Home alone, millions of residences are now equipped with a voice interface that gives immediate access to the Internet. Add to that mobile voice assistants like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google Voice, which are all enjoying a surge in popularity, and it’s no wonder that most analysts predict that conversational interfaces will go mainstream in 2017. Voice interfaces are taking off so fast that no company will want to ignore them.
But before launching right in, companies will want to identify the right context for any new voice-driven service, paying special attention to who will use the service, which is the best interface for it, which tasks it should enable, and which platforms, browsers, operating systems, and devices it should support.
Then, while virtual assistants will continue to gain ground, phone-based IVR interactions are not completely disappearing as an essential customer engagement channel. Companies will need to create a coherent voice interface strategy that includes both IVR and virtual assistants and ensures that a consistent and high-quality customer experience is delivered across both of them at all times. That will mean understanding and applying principles of great conversational design across all customer interaction channels.
Also important going forward will be the separation of the design and development phases of any project, according to Robinson. “The reality is there are multiple phases in delivering an IVR. There is the design phase, there’s a development phase, and there’s a run-time phase. You need different tools for all phases.”
But in the end, as with any customer service project, any and all design specs need to be developed with the end user in mind, Robinson says.
Phillip Britt is a freelance writer in the Chicago area. He can be reached at spenterprises@wowway.com.