Automated Agents: not people, not normal speech apps.

Voxify is so confident in its Automated Agents--essentially speech applications--that in all of the company's marketing materials and case studies, the Automated Agents are referred to as "who," a pronoun used to stand in for people and animals with names. Despite this, and for the sake of Associated Press reporting guidelines, this article will approach the Automated Agents as impersonal (i.e., that or which).

The Automated Agents are just that--automated--and are, therefore, not people. Though, they do come close.

Voxify's Automated Agents are speech applications designed to handle mission-critical customer calls for companies' full range of call types, not only the most basic informational calls but also complex transactional calls. Instead of building call paths, where expected responses are hard-coded, the company built conversation skills needed for graceful and flexible management of common caller behaviors. Automated Agents aim to skillfully guide a call to a desired outcome, keeping the call and caller from straying from the desired path, while also giving the caller latitude in his or her responses.

Powered by the Conversation Engine, Automated Agents do not require the foresight to predict all potential paths a conversation might take, nor do they need to code the resulting possible explosion of call paths. The Agents accommodate the many turns that both occur naturally in human conversation and are problematic in many speech applications, as hard-coded expectant responses often stall when they encounter a response not in their database. For example, callers often use unnecessary words in responses; offer information in arbitrary order; or provide requested information in bits and pieces.

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Voxify's approach is significantly different from other speech applications in that, at its inception, the company analyzed caller behaviors that cause a conversation's undesired reroute. The skills needed to handle these caller behaviors were then built into software called the Voxify Conversation Engine, a technology for automating the development and maintenance of highly usable speech applications.

The Conversation Engine, the core of the speech applications, gives the Automated Agents advanced conversational skills, enabling them to engage callers in sophisticated dialog and understand multiple fragments of information in a single response or adjust to unexpected information provided by the caller. As a result, callers are able to experience an Automated Agent that offers an approximation of a live agent's effectiveness--an understanding of how to quickly and easily give callers what they need.

Automated Agents come with detailed call analytics that examine customer decisions, drop-off points and likelihood ratios. The analytics and built-in performance tracking help companies continually improve call completion and conversion rates. As well, the Agents provide data about the automated call to live agents and other systems.

Though product price usually finds itself absent from this monthly feature, Voxify offers strong incentives. Each Automated Agent can handle thousands of calls a day at less than half the cost of a live agent, according to the company's technical description of the applications; companies do not pay when the agents are idle. With Voxify's pay-per-performance pricing, companies pay for success--nothing more.

"They are to hold us responsible," Amit Desai, Voxify co-founder and VP of products, said in an interview. "Numbers and delivery--we do our absolute best because the success of our best will only benefit us if it benefits that company using the Agents."

However, like experienced live agents, Automated Agents come pre-trained in specific customer service functions of select industries, industries that include (but are not exclusive to) airlines, retail, hospitality, financial services, utilities and media and entertainment. This means there is no need for a company to teach the Agents the vocabulary or concepts of its industry. Further, the Agents--in an open-standards environment (VoiceXML/J2EE)--can quickly integrate with various industry systems and back-end systems. They are simply trained on the specifics of the implementing company's business processes and are shown where to find the data. Once the first Automated Agent is deployed, the subsequent virtual agent inherits its "personality" and business rules training. They can begin taking the first live calls in six to eight weeks; they can be in full 24/7 production within the following few weeks.

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Automated Agents can handle any spikes in any business. Companies don't have to spend days modeling, forecasting and scheduling. Companies that use the Agents also don't have to pay agents overtime, nor do they have to hire and train surplus help. Voxify's speech applications offer companies instant scalability balanced with their call volume.

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Voxify's newest Automated Agents, announced May 2005, include the following agent types: shopping; order-taking; order status; catalog request; inventory check; lead capture; store locator; loyalty program/account; welcome; and gift card.

Though they aren't quite live agents, Voxify's Automated Agents speech applications offer a performance level and a flexibility that are comparable to live agents, only on a cost system that requires payment based on the very success of that level of performance.

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By David R. Butcher, Assistant Editor, Customer Inter@ction Solutions