‘Say ‘Five’ After The Tone If You Want To Curse One Of Our Customer Service Computers’

By | February 13, 2004

The good news: We don’t have to use those silly touch-tone menus anymore when we call our friendly utility. Now we can speak to a real computer.

A report by Chartwell, an industry research service, says that more and more utilities “are implementing or investigating speech recognition for their interactive voice response units, and advocates say the technology has the potential to revolutionize automated customer service”. What this ‘revolution’ means, it turns out, is that customers can use voice recognition to report outages, or even conduct “customer self-service” (I love that idea! Why didn’t I think of that?) such as billing, payments and updating account information. As someone who has just tried to resolve some thorny billing problems relating to my mother’s poor choice of electricity and gas utility in the UK, I can only say: Yeehar!

Here’s Dennis Smith, Research Director & Manager of Chartwell’s CIS & Customer Service Research Series: “Speech recognition is a progressive customer self-service tool that can be extremely valuable to a utility, provided it is designed correctly.” Incorrect designs are, among other things, unfriendly self-help service menus. Oh. So we don’t get to chat with a computer, we get to say ‘two’ instead of pressing two on our touch tone phone. That’s progress.

This is another bit I like: The report includes case studies on what it calls ‘progressive utilities’ (as opposed to what? ‘Regressive utilities’? ‘Incorrect thinking utilities’?) utilizing speech recognition technology. One, We Energies, “after concluding that many of its incoming calls related to billing or payments, implemented a speech system in order to offer customers a more personal and prompt way to conduct business without the assistance of a customer service representative (CSR)”. I am particularly happy the customer service representative has an abbreviation: Given it’s the only one in the report I can only assume that assigning an abbreviation is what happens prior to downsizing. And how, exactly, can you have a ‘personal’ way to conduct business using a computer? More personal than what? Pressing the keypads on your phone until they sink into the plastic moulding?

Look, I’m a big fan of computers, and I’m probably still reeling from trying to find an email address I could write to to complain (there wasn’t one; even the website wouldn’t recognise my Mozilla  browser and suggested I upgrade. You’re a utility, for God’s sake! You’re selling electricity! It’s not as if you’re selling Porsches, or smartphones! What if I was some elderly person wanting to check my electricity bill? Jeez) but I don’t get it. I always hoped that computerisation would free up staff so they could talk to customers, find out what’s bugging them, try to make things better. I guess that’s never going to happen now. We’re going to be sitting there in the dark, the electricity long gone out, the gas fire cold, saying ‘four… six… six…. I said SIX’, our voices echoing down the hallways, for eternity. Please, give me an CSR. I really need a CSR.

You can buy the full report, Speech-Enabled Customer Service Applications in the Utility Industry for $350 here.

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