For the most vocal members of the current generation of entrepreneurs, investors and app developers disruption is a religion. Based on Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of “Creative Destruction,” first articulated in his work entitled Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), disruption is now synonymous with process improvement, reduction in business friction and, ultimately, return on investment.

In the fields that I focus on – digital commerce and intelligent assistance – worship of disruption spells deprecation of old ways of doing things and casting aside of the people that support them. Think of the impact of Uber or Lyft on the taxicab industry and the lives of individual cab drives. Looking at customer care, disruption is an existential threat to the core technologies and personnel behind contact centers and interactive voice response systems (IVRs).

A Ray of Hope at SpeechTek

At this year’s SpeechTek several speakers and exhibitors made a strong case for “business transformation,” as opposed to disruption. Customer experience professionals from USAA and United Health Care described how a set of core technologies that include speech processing, natural language understanding, predictive analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence are already being implemented in their companies in ways that improve automation rates (self-service) while, at the same time, increasing customer satisfaction. In their case, new technologies are transformational, not disruptive.

Disruption is anathema to customer experience professionals. Their ideal is to minimize handle times, service interruptions and other speed-bumps that stand between and individual and his or her ability to complete a desired task or transaction. They try to eliminate any sort of “cognitive load” that a customer might find time-consuming or onerous. That has led to replacing hard-to-remember passwords or challenge questions with voice-based authentication as well as enabling customers to use their own words to describe what they are looking for or trying to do. Introducing “disruptive technologies” is not in their vocabulary.

Companies like USAA and UHC are following a technological imperative. They deploy “intelligent assistance” technologies to differentiate their products and brands and to create competitive advantage. Amazon.com has long been the master in this respect. Decades ago, it originated (or at least popularized) recommendation engines and “one-click” payments. More recently, with the introduction of Echo, it has augmented its presence with an in home appliance that can respond to natural language input to control devices, conduct searches and perform shopping tasks.

In the context of customer care and digital commerce, disruption is “bad”. It implies service interruptions, conversational discontinuities and general failure to complete tasks. Transformation, on the other hand, represents “good”. It holds the promise of new, improved ways of accomplishing goals and better ways of engaging in conversations and completing tasks.

For individual customers or prospects, technological innovation is both disruptive and transformational. Their familiarity with Amazon’s Echo, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and the unnamed resource that responds to “Okay Google” has conditioned them to expect more positive results when they type into a Web site’s chat box, or speak in their own words to an “avatar” inside a mobile app or front-ending a company’s IVR.

During a presentation at SpeechTek entitled “The USAA/Nuance Journey to a Personalized & Easy-to-Use IVR” USAA personnel demonstrated their understanding of the power of intelligent assistance as they marched through several initiatives they launched with their vendor Nuance to bring a simple, secure, natural interface to their customer care resources. Likewise, United Healthcare (UHC) showed how it is preparing to introduce voice biometric-based technology to simplify caller authentication and sign-in. In both cases, creating a pleasant, secure and friction-free user experience was paramount.

Technologies That Simplify Transformation

Meanwhile, on the exhibition floor, two companies are noteworthy for their efforts to support fundamental transformation of customer care infrastructure. One is Interactions, LLC. Now that it has assimilated the personnel and technology that comprise AT&T’s Watson Speech and Language Processing resources, it is ready to bring a full suite of speech processing, voice biometrics and speech analytics capabilities to the marketplace. The “usual suspects” of telecom, travel, hospitality and financial services will be the most likely beneficiaries but other companies – such as retailing and healthcare/insurance are ripe for transformation.

Another company that deserves recognition is Cyara. At SpeechTek, it was featuring a new set of tools that simplify the process of moving the scripts and routines housed in old, proprietary IVR systems on to the latest revs of more “open” computer servers and media processing platforms. The Cyara Crawler enables IT managers or IVR specialists to debug, migrate and do regression analysis of applications in ways that support business transformation without service disruption. What can be more disruptive (in the competitive sense of the word) than that? All in the name of business transformation.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: customer care, Natural language processing, Interactive Voice Response, intelligent Assistants