Automated speech competes with offshore centres

International

The decision by Lloyds TSB, the UK’s fifth largest bank, to close its contact centre in Mumbai, which typically handles overflow calls when Lloyds TSB’s UK agents are busy, is being described by financial services market analysts, Datamonitor, as a landmark moment in the development of automated speech-enabled phone self-service technology. According to Datamonitor, the decision also confirms its prediction three years ago that speech-enabled self-service technology would compete with offshore contact center customer service agents. Datamonitor says that a contact center in an offshore location, like India, saves Western businesses approximately 25% to 35% per transaction. However, a call serviced through speech automation costs approximately 15% to 25% of the cost of a call handled by an agent in India. Speech recognition was once viewed as a futuristic technology that would never leave the realm of science fiction. “But over the past 50 years, key technology and commercial achievements in speech recognition along with increased central processing unit (CPU) performance and lower hardware costs have helped make speech commercially viable for enterprises and service providers,” Daniel Hong, lead analyst at Datamonitor, said.