Contact centres hang up on speech recognition

Contact centres have given a big thumbs-down to speech recognition, according to an IVR survey carried out by Call Centre Helper. Only 18% of contact centres (that fronted their calls with an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system) used it in combination with speech recognition. The IVR survey was carried out on the Call Centre Helper website in February 2012 and had a total of 425 respondees. This seems to tie in with the latest figures kindly provided by Steve Morrell of ContactBabel from the latest Contact Centre Decision-Makers' Guide, showing an average of 10% of contact centres using speech recognition. The big problem seems to be the overall accuracy – particularly with regional accents.