IBM is offering technology to help Indian and other foreign agents improve their English skills, reduce their accents and avoid using phrases that may be unfamiliar to English speakers in the U.S. or other primarily English-speaking countries.
According to this article in the Louisville Courier-Journal, "The program evaluates grammar, pronunciation, comprehension and other spoken-language skills, and provides detailed scores for each category. It uses specially adapted speech-recognition software to score the pronunciation of passages and the stressing of syllables for words."
The full article may be accessed here: http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061127/BUSINESS/611270334/1003
TES
Here's an interesting article from Bob Sullivan's blog on MSNBC today about a practice loosely termed "reversed telemarketing." Indian telemarketers call stone-cold leads (years-old responses to spam) with the hopes of catching a few "live" ones. They then transfer any live leads to, in this case, mortgage brokers in the U.S., who pay per live, transferred lead.
Read the full blog entry at: http://redtape.msnbc.com/2006/11/spam_never_dies.html#posts
TES
Here's an interesting response I received to my November "Last Call" column, which can be read here: http://www.tmcnet.com/call-center/1106/cis-last-call-1106.htm.
#1 fan here. You really got wound up on this Nov. issue's Last Call. Whew. I can't disagree with you. The stats. are really amazing. I don't remember the exact source, but I read one recently where the call center workers and then the callers into the same customer care operations were surveyed on service quality. 3/4 of the workers said they were delivering good service, but only 23% of their customers reported receiving same.
Where I might slightly differ from your message is that I don't think the reasons for the disconnect are always as complex as you suggest. Quick and true example: A client approached us recently: "We're getting 95% satisfaction scores. Can we really be that good?" Me: "Well, that does seem awfully high. Where is the data coming from?" Client: "We do a survey at the end of a customer service call." Me: "Oh. Rather than ask the callers to stay on the line, why don't we call them back? We'll ask the very same questions."
It seemed better just to make the suggested change than blurt out: "Excuse me? All the disgruntled callers hung up before the survey, and since you rate agents on satisfaction, they have the incentive to just say 'goodbye' to the dissatisfied caller and wait for the caller to disconnect before releasing the line. Your survey gets 95% sat. scores because you're only asking the happy campers!"
BTW, we did make the change and the sat. scores dropped from 95% to 55%.
Statisticians call it "Confirmation Bias"; my personal descriptor is "The Pollyanna Effect". Essentially, humans readily accept good news when it fits what they want to believe, and will tend to reject that which "does not compute". Combine this with the truth that customer service managers are still measured more on saving costs than serving customers, and so a cheap survey that delivers nice numbers which no one will question has much appeal. And since the numbers look so good, its "proof" of good service, so why change anything?
Rick Rappe'
Vocalabs
TES
A U.S. government-commissioned study had claimed to have discovered that, based on search engine indexing, the Internet is comprised of one percent porn. As the conventional wisdom is that the Internet is 99 percent junk and one percent useful content (news sites, TMCnet, newspapers, retail Web sites, scholarly research, etc.) what's the other 98 percent of drivel? Teenagers' MySpace pages? Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan fiction? Canadian drug sites for Viagra (or should that be V!@GRA!!!) and snake oil pills? Tell-all sites devoted to celebrity airheads like Paris Hilton? And with regards to the latter, why do we need tell-all tabloid journalism to tell all about people who are clearly desperate to tell all about themselves to anyone who will listen anyway?
View the full article here: http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/11/15/internet.blocking.ap/index.html
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