For anyone who's ever called a customer service or similar call center and walked away from the experience unhappy, there's good news afoot as Tata Sky's contact center recently got some fresh augmentation in the form of speech recognition systems from Nuance Communications, making it easier to deal with a contact center even when there might have been a language barrier formerly.
The Nuance Communications speech recognition systems allow users to work in a dozen different languages, including English, Hindi, and 10 other Indian languages to either get questions resolved outright or get routed to a customer service representative better able to provide the help needed. Since Tata Sky is a direct to home (DTH) cable provider, it means many different calls coming in about a variety of functions.
But as Tata Sky describes, the addition of Nuance Communications systems allows for many of these functions to be routed to voice control systems or the like. One example provided was that, should a caller have an interest in a certain movie on its Showcase system, the customer can simply say the name of the film and the time desired for viewing, which means that that caller no longer need speak to a customer service representative, and no longer needs to endure the call transfer system for something as simple as requesting certain films.
Tata Sky's managing director and CEO, Harit Nagpal, offered up some comment on the new systems, saying “Nuance’s professional services helped us to build a solution that integrated well with our current system and mapped well with our business processes. This deployment has successfully impacted the customer experience at Tata Sky.”
It's not hard to see how such a system might provide the impact that Nagpal points out. It's a situation that many have been in before and likely will be in again at some point; calling into a customer system in which the representative's accent and speech patterns are so wildly different from one's own that it's almost impossible to understand what's being said is often a fact of life when it comes to calling into a contact center. But with a speech recognition system like the kind Nuance can bring to the table that can change matters significantly.
As Nuance's general manager for the India and ASEAN regions, Sunny Rao, pointed out, customers can use a preferred language and speak conversationally, not having to spend a lot of time in repetition or in over-enunciation in a bid to make a language more understandable over a phone line. It's a fairly universal standard that, if a service is easy to use, customers will prefer to use it over a service that is not. That might change a few minds who were planning to leave Tata Sky for some other service, and that in turn might well save Tata Sky a few losses. Potentially, it may even yield gain for the company as its newly-satisfied customers start advertising to friends and colleagues in the market.
While only time will tell just how well this new system works out, if it works as well as early indications suggest it does over the long term, then there's every chance that this will provide some great long-term returns for Tata Sky. If it works well there, it's likely to work well at other companies as well, producing not only a win for Tata Sky, but also for Nuance as its voice recognition systems get a lot of new users.
Edited by Peter Bernstein