Joseph Brown, Vice President of Voice Solutions, RightNow Technologies
RightNow Service provides multi-channel solutions to capture customer interactions from both traditional and online channels. Founded in 1997, RightNow is headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, with additional offices in North America, Europe and Asia.
Speech Technology Magazine sat down with Joseph Brown, vice president of voice solutions at RightNow Technologies, to discuss the importance of speech self-service.
Q. Joe, please tell us a little about RightNow Technologies and your role within the company.
A. RightNow delivers high-impact CRM solutions and services that enable organizations to cost-efficiently deliver a consistently superior customer experience across all of their frontline marketing, sales and service touch-points. More than 1,700 corporations and government agencies worldwide are now using RightNow's technology to achieve their strategic business objectives and better meet the needs of those they serve. We're headquartered in Bozeman, Montana, and we went public in August 2004. We also acquired Convergent Voice in June 2005.
My role is to make sure RightNow customers can fully leverage their voice channel to achieve their various CRM-related business objectives—which typically include delivery of a great customer experience, the reduction of operational costs, and optimizing visibility into customer needs and concerns.
Q. With all the controversy surrounding SpeechTEK's keynote with Paul English, how would you recommend that enterprises balance automation and customer satisfaction?
A. It's not so much a matter of balancing automation and satisfaction as it is implementing automation technologies that drive satisfaction—rather than undermining it. One of the biggest problems we have in the industry is that people have historically bought their voice applications from either PBX hardware vendors or niche speech vendors. Buying voice applications from a PBX vendor is a bit like buying an enterprise ERP system from a router manufacturer. Expertise in infrastructure "plumbing" doesn't make you very good at delivering business intelligence. And when you buy voice applications from a niche player, you wind up with a very siloed set of capabilities.
So rather than trying to "balance" automation versus satisfaction, RightNow's position is that you can actually achieve both. You can do this by implementing voice solutions that are part of your overall CRM environment. That way, your voice automation can be driven by all the knowledge you already have about your customer. So rather than frustrating your customers, you can actually deliver very personalized service. When automated voice is simply another channel in your overall CRM environment, you can also easily allow your customer to jump to any other channel—such as attended voice, web self-service, email or chat—just as English suggests you do.
Q. Why do you think it is important to route callers to a self-service application?
A. Many people think of self-service as purely a cost reduction strategy. But cost savings are not always the primary benefit. A lot of companies using our solutions are looking to deliver a competitively differentiated customer experience. So they see self-service as a way to deliver information to customers more quickly and/or provide 24/7 service. It's also a way to let your contact center staff focus on issues that truly warrant their personal attention and expertise. You'd be surprised at how much you can positively impact contact center turnover and boost employee morale by offloading routine queries to voice and web self-service.
Q. How can enterprises use speech technologies to build customer loyalty?
A. When you deliver a great voice experience to your customer, you increase satisfaction and support a stronger brand identity. It's particularly important to differentiate your voice experience from the competition. You can do this in a variety of ways, such as using speech recognition instead of confusing keypad entries or using synthesized speech to allow customers to check their account information. One thing that's unique about RightNow's self-service applications is that they get smarter as your customers use them. We use all kinds of AI techniques to automatically "learn" what particular piece of information a customer is looking for when he or she says or does certain things. So your automation actually gets smarter over time—which means it makes your customers happier.
Actually, in today's market, you don't just have to outperform your competitors, because your customers expectations are driven by every bank, retailer, services company or government agency they've dealt with in the last few months. So your voice channel has to be on par with the best organizations in every industry.
Q. How do you think outsourced call centers impact the customer experience versus speech self-service?
A. It's not an either/or situation. Automated voice and attended voice are simply two channels out of many. Automation can be great or horrible. Outsourcers can be great or horrible as well. One of the issues with outsourcers is that companies often lack sufficient visibility into their day-to-day performance—or they can't smoothly escalate issues from an outsourced first tier to an internal second tier. Here again, RightNow has proven to be very effective by enabling companies and their outsourcing partners to share a common set of applications, so there is far greater transparency in the way customer calls are handled.
Q. What impact do you feel upfront costs have on the speech industry's market penetration?
A. They have a negative impact on the acceptance and penetration of speech. Obviously, if budgets are tight and buyers are unsure of their near-term ROI, adoption will be inhibited by upfront costs. And where there has been reasonable ROI, it typically has not been achieved very quickly, due to the size of capital investments required.
But today's on demand solutions have eliminated these inhibiting factors by allowing organizations to implement speech technology without having to make burdensome upfront investments in infrastructure and competency. In fact, by having your vendor host your solution for you, you can not only eliminate capital costs—you can also radically accelerate time-to-benefit and more easily scale capacity up or down as you need to.
Q. What are a few "best practices" that you would recommend to enterprises to receive consistent feedback from their solutions?
A. There are basically two types of feedback: explicit and implicit. Explicit feedback is the kind you get when you ask your customers to rate their experience. This obviously isn't something you want to bug them with on every call, but you should take a statistically significant sample.
Implicit feedback is the kind you get when you apply appropriate analytics to your voice system metrics. How many prompts did your customers have to hit before they got to the information they wanted? Where are calls getting abandoned? One of the great things about managing your voice channel in a common manner with your other channels is that you can discover which issues customers are successfully resolving elsewhere after first trying and failing to do so with your voice system.
And you absolutely must act on any feedback you receive immediately. There is no point in gathering feedback, if there is no process in place for learning from it and responding to it. There's nothing more annoying to a customer than giving feedback and then finding out no one really cared anyway. Conversely, if you show you care, you can quickly turn negative experiences into positive ones.
Q. Is there anything that you would like to add?
A. I would just like to emphasize that it just doesn't make sense any more for companies to treat voice as a communications "silo," rather than just another channel for delivering information to and getting information from its customers. You want to give the same answers over the phone as you do on your web site. You want to treat techophobic customers as well as you treat web-savvy ones. You want to get a 360-degree view of your customers, and you want to present a 360-degree view of your company to your customers. You can only do this when voice, web, email, and chat are managed, automated and measured in a unified manner—and when the software you're using can adapt to your customers' changing needs based on intelligence captured in your CRM environment, rather than by what some programming an engineer did on your PBX.