DIRECTVLook Who’s Talking

Michael UhlenkampCall Center Technology Manager

mjuhlenkamp@directv.com

Speech to Increase Revenue & Decrease Costs (D103), Monday, August 20, 1:45-2:45 p.m

Agenda

• About DIRECTV • Issues DIRECTV faced with IVR Self-Care• Approach to solving those challenges• Results of new developments• Lessons learned• Where we are going from here?• Demo of DIRECTV IVR

About DIRECTV

• Nation’s leading satellite television provider with over 16 million customers

• Over 250 channels of 100% digital picture and sound

• Most comprehensive sports programming available anywhere including exclusive rights to NFL Sunday Ticket

• Soon to offer up to 150 channels in High Definition

Challenges

• 16 Million calls every month• Contact Centers support entire life cycle of our

customers• Complex and fast changing environment• Confusing maze of DTMF menus and use of internal

language and categorizations• More products and services then you could ever fit

in a DTMF menu• Desire to improve customer satisfaction

Goals

• Simplify call flows and help callers find what they need and find it faster

• Increase self-care utilization• Allow room for new products, services and

functionality• Reduce number of repeat callers• Enhance our customer satisfaction

What was our approach?

• Partnered with West Interactive to introduce Natural Language to our IVR

• 8 months from idea to initial implementation• Call Steering First - Phased roll-out• Expanded use of ASR and Natural Language through-out

the IVR• Monitor Performance

– Survey Customers– Usability Studies– Key Indicators

Results – Successful Transactions

Success Rate

10.0%

15.0%

20.0%

25.0%

30.0%

35.0%

40.0%

January February March April May June July August September October November December

Results – Volume Reduction

5,000,000

6,000,000

7,000,000

8,000,000

9,000,000

10,000,000

11,000,000

12,000,000

13,000,000

0.0%

5.0%

10.0%

15.0%

20.0%

25.0%

30.0%

35.0%

40.0%

Call Volume

Success Rate

Results

• Decrease Transfers– 5% Improvement in Agent Transfers

• Decrease Repeat Callers– 17% Decrease in Repeat Calls

• Customer Satisfaction– 60% Decrease in Negative Comments to Agents– Immediately Realized a 5% Improvement in Overall

Satisfaction based on Customer Survey Data

Results - Survey CommentsBelow are examples of positive IVR comments received via the customer survey.

“..clear, easy to understand and follow”

“..the automated system is very helpful when you have a simple question and don’t want to wait”

“..it’s simple, the best of both worlds”

“.. the system worked great and I extremely satisfied!”

“Glad to see you taking advantage of the enormously improved voice recognition technology available today!”

“I was pleased with the voice response system and it's refreshing to see companies taking advantage of new technology to improve their customer service.”

Lessons Learned

• Tuning is Key from Day 1– Learn From It, Improve From It

• Customers are on a Learning Curve– Customers are relatively comfortable with Speech– Natural Language is a whole new step

• Standard Speech and DTMF are Still Valuable– Directed Dialogue and DTMF still play important roles– Some applications lend themselves to Directed Dialogue

or DTMF better than to Natural Language– DTMF backup is vital

Lessons Learned

• Streamline your Application– Consider the full customer experience– End-to-End flow needs to be considered

• People WILL ask for a Representative– Be prepared to handle this in a way that you can keep

the call in the IVR when it makes sense– Offer automation, sometimes people don’t realize they

can accomplish what they want in the IVR

Where to Next?

• As always……keep tuning• Enhance disambiguation functionality• Continued streamlining of process flows• Transition additional modules to speech where

it makes sense• Review potential for speech in Spanish

Sample Calls