A key motivation for developing interactive speech systems is to
reduce the cost of call centers by handling routine calls automatically.
Depending on an application's purpose, your company will decide whether
or not to make human agents available to users of the system; this
decision has consequences for the design of a speech application,
as shown in Table 1. If agents are
available, you will probably want to include the Transfer to Agent
command (and its synonym, the DTMF key 0) in the set of global commands,
as explained inAdopting a consistent set of global navigation commands.
Table 1. Use of human agents
| Application goal |
Recommendation |
| High-quality customer service |
If high-quality customer service is a main goal
of the application, then it should probably include the ability to
transfer calls to human agents, either automatically on the detection
of user difficulty with the application (see Choosing help mode or self-revealing help for more details) or at the
user's request. While automated systems have improved greatly since
their initial introduction, they are not always able to provide the
customer support required for a uniformly high level of customer satisfaction. |
| Reduced costs |
If reduced cost is the overriding goal of the application,
there may not be any human agents. In this case, you should probably
still put the Transfer to Agent command in a global grammar, but the
system response on hearing the command is to inform the user that
no agents are available. This prevents the speech recognition engine
from trying to match the user input “Transfer to Agent” with something
else in the grammar, which could lead to a misrecognition. It also
directly and unambiguously informs the user that the system does not
have any human agents and provides an opportunity to tell callers
about other e-Service options such as a website. |
For example, controlling costs is likely to be the primary concern
for an application that provides company employees with a telephony
interface to a directory dialer of internal telephone numbers. In
the following example, the system offers the user an alternative way
to get the desired information.
| User: |
Transfer to Agent.
|
| System: |
There are no agents available for this system. Would you like to hear the Web
address for our internal telephone directory?
|
| User: |
Yes.
|
| System: |
The Web address is www.yourco.directory.com.
Please select Repeat, Go Back, Main Menu or Exit.
|
|