MTI Releases Its "P.H.A.T. Phone Stats"
ATLANTA — Message Technologies, Inc. (MTI) released its "P.H.A.T. (Platforms, Hosting, Applications and Telephony) Phone Stats."
MTI has culled the following statistics from various public sources, presented with source information in footnotes, below.
1. "A report from Frost & Sullivan finds that the customer care outsourcing market earned revenues of $19.5 billion in 2005, and is likely to reach $20.1 billion in 2012."[i]
2. During the next few years, Aberdeen Research indicates that annual spending for IVR technology in the USA will increase 35 percent per year. [ii]
3. According to BBN Technologies, "The ratio between cost of agents and all other costs, such as telecom time, and IVR hardware and software costs, is at least 4:1."[iii]
4. The Center for Customer-Driven Quality at Purdue University notes that while IVR has wide penetration in an estimated 75 percent of all call centers, speech IVR is just beginning to gain traction. They estimate some form of speech recognition is in 10 percent of all call centers. In some industries like utilities, airlines and financial services, speech recognition may be in 25 percent of call centers.[iv]
5. "Within five years, speech will be in 75 percent of all call centers in some form."[v]
6. Experts believe that 75 percent of all contact can be "speechified."[vi]
7. Cost estimates indicate that:
- Speech IVR costs less than 25 cents per contact
- Live/CSR costs $6 to $20 per contact
- Online chat costs $2 to $12 per contact
- Email costs $2 to $5 per contact
- Touchtone IVR costs 10 cents per contact, and
- FAQs cost one cent per contact. [vii]
Exact costs will vary with each custom application.
8. For speech IVR implementations, an ROI of six to nine months is not only common, but also expected.[viii]
9. "80 percent of customers surveyed said they form their first impressions of a service organization based on their experience with the call center."[ix]
10. Recent research shows that more than 65 percent of customers who desert a company, do so because of poor service, which they define primarily as poor access.[x]
11. Customer service providers across various vertical markets will take advantage of additional cost savings: the applications and resources they are already using to offer customer service on the Web can support a speech IVR solution.[xi]
[i] TMCnet, "Contact Center News," June 19, 2006, By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor.
[iii] International Journal of Speech Technology. Volume 5, p. 29, "A Data-Driven Methodology for Evaluating and Optimizing Call Center IVRs," 2002, By Bernhard Suhm and Pat Peterson.
[iv]CRM Project, Volume 6, pp. 124-126, "Natural Speech Recognition: The Next Re(e)volution," March 2, 2006, By Richard Feinberg, PhD, Purdue University, Center for Customer-Driven Insight.
[x] CRM Project, Volume 6, pp. 2-3, "Any time…From Anywhere…In Any Form," 2006, By Richard Feinberg, Mike Trotter, and Jon Anton.
[xi] International Engineering Consortium Web site. "Speech-Enabled Interactive Voice Response Systems." 2005, http://www.iec.org/online/tutorials/speech_enabled/:.