A comparative study of speech in the call center: natural language call routing vs. touch-tone menus

  • Authors:

  • Bernhard Suhm;Josh Bers;Dan McCarthy;Barbara Freeman;David Getty;Katherine Godfrey;Pat Peterson

  • Affiliations:

  • BBN Technologies, Cambridge, MA;BBN Technologies, Cambridge, MA;BBN Technologies, Cambridge, MA;BBN Technologies, Cambridge, MA;BBN Technologies, Cambridge, MA;BBN Technologies, Cambridge, MA;BBN Technologies, Cambridge, MA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

This paper presents a field study that compares natural language call routing with standard touch-tone menus. Call routing is the task of getting callers to the right place in the call center, which could be the appropriate live agent or automated service. Natural language call routing lets callers describe the reason for their call in their own words, instead of presenting them with a list of menu options to select from using the telephone touch-tone keypad. The field study was conducted in a call center of a large telecommunication service provider. Results show that with natural language call routing, more callers respond to the main routing prompt, more callers are routed to a specific destination (instead of defaulting to a general operator who may have to transfer them), and more callers are routed to the correct agent. Our survey data show that callers overwhelmingly prefer natural language call routing over standard touch-tone menus. Furthermore, natural language call routing can also deliver significant cost savings to call centers