Successful speech-enabled call routing tools, he says, are made of components working together to connect the caller to his destination “according to a spoken name or phrase.” That being the case, here are the five major components you want:
The speech recognizer. This is what acts as the interpreter for matching a spoken name or phrase with an entry in the system’s directory. “Often disparaged in contemporary society (see any number of comic strip plots pertaining to poor speech recognizer performance for reference),” as Maxwell notes correctly, it’s in a thankless position -- it’s where the user interacts with the application, and as such gets the abuse when the system doesn’t function the way the user expects.
The grammar. This helps determine the spoken request for the purpose of connecting the caller accurately. Formed well, it defines for the recognizer the expected words, pronunciation and grammatical structure of the request.
Read more here.
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In a good post titled “How to manage different customer interaction points to enhance customer engagement” on the Contactual blog, Meghdutt Brahmachari notes that as an organization selling something, “how you manage your customer engagement will make or break your business.”
A customer touch point is pretty much any interaction your customer has with your organization. Brahmachari gives three solid pointers on how to manage these interactions and ensure they work to the advantage of your company:
Go where your customers are. Yeah it sounds basic, but friends, you’d be surprised how many companies give this short shrift. Yes, we know that predicting how customers will first contact you is difficult, as Brahmachari says: “You cannot control what the customer’s initial touch point will be; they can find you through a variety of sources ranging from online sources to offline trade shows to referrals, to name a few.”
At least if you’re doing your job right they can, and this includes contact via Web chat, e-mail, social media and SMS. What you need to do, then, is use different mediums of communication to increase your visibility across different channels to make it easy for prospects to find you, then once they have made the first contact, it will be easier for you to control their experience based on different calls to actions, as Brahmachari says.
Read more here.
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Remember when the only thing data center operators wanted was “colder, please?” That got expensive. As it turns out, however, data centers can run in warmer climates than previously suspected, allowing pretty substantial savings in cooling costs.
Dell officials say they have validated a group of server, storage and networking equipment to operate “within the new allowable temperature and humidity ranges released recently by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers.”
According to an article written by industry journal Datacenter Dynamics, the point of this move is to let data centers supporting such equipment reduce their energy consumption by the cooling plant “and, in some cases, allowing the data center to go completely chillerless.”
Read more here.
