Dixie Electric IVR captures rotary dial, DTMF with equal ease.

It's not easy to get customer response in times of disaster when half of your customers still have rotary phones. Voice recognition can help, but what if many of those folks have distinct accents?

DEMCO, Dixie Electric Management Corp., is a rural electricity agency cooperative serving 58,000 customers in seven parishes running north from Baton Rouge, La. to Mississippi. When customers call to report problems, they expect to be heard and helped.

The solution, says John Vranic, director of planning and systems operations for DEMCO, was a system that can pick up touchtone but also can do voice recognition of customers calling in to report downed lines, power outages or transformer fires.

"We can get the end result both ways," Vranic says. Customers simply call into the utility and are greeted with this message: "If you are calling from a touch-tone telephone, please enter the telephone number of the affected location." If the system recognizes a DTMF response, it takes down the caller's phone number, repeats it, and prompts for a "yes, that is correct" entry from the caller. If the number is incorrect, it tries again. The system is the same for a voice call, with the voice recognition "speaking" back the number and then thanking the caller for calling.

DEMCO has a phone number hunt to pinpoint the affected location. "I match versus the customer's number. There may be two or three accounts at the same number and we sort that out. The dispatcher gets that information and creates an outage record."

The phone number is processed by their ORS (outage reporting system), which retrieves the relevant customer information and forwards it to a dispatcher. A knowledge-based system called ASTORM sorts call records for devices common to people who have called in. Developed by DEMCO and ABD of Raleigh, N.C., it is a module of the system's manipulability that ties the system to a single X-Windows terminal. It records devices by area, feeder line, or parts of a line.

The system has the learning capability to use first the dialects it sees most often and bring forward the ones it sees as most prominent in the area. "But that is not really a problem," Vranic says, as a test run-through proves.

Should the system fail in voice recognition, it puts the caller into voice mail. "But I try to avoid that mightily," he says.

Syntellect does the front-end work, passing that as a batch file to a PC which passes it to a DEC station running in X-Windows. The midprocessing system was installed by integrator Joe Moore of KnowledgeTel in Dallas. Data is handled by an ALR running SCO-Unix.

Between September 26 and October 2, 1992, the agency was inundated with customers reporting power outages in the aftermath of a hurricane. Normally processing 200 calls a day, they estimate handling 15,000 calls on eight lines in the three days following the storm. This is in addition to the normal load. Reliable voice technology and prompt customer support let the agency to keep in touch with customers during the crisis.

"Our average transaction time was two minutes, 50 seconds, " Vranic says, "versus five to six minutes with humans on those high-volume periods." Today, a caller familiar with the system can report an outage in 11 seconds.

Since January 1992, DEMCO has been using three Premier Infobots to provide 12, lines of interactive voice response for DEMCO to process customer-reported problems.

Vranic says they had tried another system, but it was not geared to the short-term, high-volume use they needed. "We told them, |get it out of here' after wasting nine months," he says. "It was presented as a capable system but those users mustn't have had much load on it.

"We are very pleased with this system's ease-of-use and reliable processing of high volumes of calls during short durations. It needs help with voice mail handling, to prompt for call-back when the system is overloaded or to advise when the system is full. But overall it's a great system," he says. "It takes care of the two major problems: callers not getting through and our need to manipulate data."

DEMCO has been so pleased with the performance of its systems that it is planning future IVR applications. These will include options for DEMCO to get more information from customers about the outage - for instance, to report whether a tree has fallen on the power line or a transformer has burnt out; and an outbound dialing feature to allow DEMCO to call back customers after the problem has been fixed.

Vranic also is adding a call-back capability DEMCO can contact the customer when power is restored using the captured phone number. The system will ask if everything is OK. If the response is "yes," the system will apologize for any inconvenience caused, and hang up. If the answer is "no," the caller will be immediately connected to a human.

The system allows him to give fast, reliable service quicker than many big-city operations.