You might recall the old advertisement for the Yellow Pages that advised you to "let your fingers do the walking." Today, that slogan might seem quaint. Speech recognition-enabled interactive voice response (IVR) software enables customers to speak commands, in place of pressing touchtones, to access the information they need. But is the technology as easy to use as it seems?

Consider how frustrating touchtone-based IVR can be. If you've ever navigated a labyrinth of touchtone menu options and still couldn't get the assistance you needed, you don't want to place your customers in the same situation. Speech recognition lets customers ask for what they want. But you don't want customers to endure prolonged hold times if your speech recognition software doesn't understand the requests they make.

So how can you avoid confusing callers when your intent is to help them?

"Our golden rule is know thy customers," says Steve Chambers, chief marketing officer for SpeechWorks (Boston, MA). "Sit in the call center and know their objectives and emotional states."

A little research can help you to design effective touchtone menus that can lead callers to the answers they need. But bear in mind that even the best-laid IVR plans won't please all customers.

"Touchtone remains the most hated form of customer service, but it can be the least expensive form of customer service," says Donna Fluss, a principal at DMG Consulting.

No customer appreciates listening to a series of IVR menus when they want human contact. Fluss recommends that you always let customers abandon IVR menus to speak with agents. But the challenge is to prevent customers from opting out to agents. That's because you save money by allowing customers to get to information or services themselves. Fluss says that IVR menus can be even less expensive than responding to e-mail messages.

Speech recognition software is more expensive than touchtone-only IVR software. But speech rec is also more versatile because it enables callers to make requests or provide information that would be difficult to enter as touchtone data.

If you already have an IVR system and want to upgrade your call center with speech recognition software, Fluss suggests that you don't abandon IVR entirely. "Even though touchtone may be hated, people become comfortable with it," she says. "Don't take away from customers what they're accustomed to using. But please feel free to enhance it."

Fluss explains that the recent recession forced call centers to cut costs by reducing their labor forces. But those centers will need to respond to rising call volumes during an economic recovery. Speech rec lets those centers automatically handle more calls, without hiring additional agents, than they could by using IVR alone.

Below, vendors review their speech rec and IVR products and describe how to best use them. Not surprisingly, they had a lot to say.

IVR That's Up To Par

Although you can depend on IVR systems to provide customers with information, you don't want to provide too much at once.

"There's a tendency [among companies] to have an IVR [system] say something they'd never have an agent say," says Ron Owens, director of product marketing for Intervoice (formerly InterVoice-Brite; Dallas, TX).

He cites as examples IVR systems that run greetings for 45 seconds or that burden callers with lists of instructions and legal disclaimers before they can get to the first menu.

To avoid common IVR pitfalls, vendors recommend that you seek outside assistance. Steve Feldman, CRM specialist for Avaya (Basking Ridge, NJ), says he's seen varying results whenever customers create their own scripts.

"This is not an area to cut corners on," warns Feldman. "Whether it's a consultant or a company that designs the [IVR] scripts." That's why Avaya, like many other vendors, offers their own consultation services to help you design IVR scripts.

IVR scripts comprise the content of each touchtone menu. To write effective scripts, you must give callers the broadest possible choices with the first menu and offer more specific options with subsequent menus. Callers can then quickly narrow the focus of their search.

"Touchtone application design best practices [that call for] no more than five options per menu and no more than three or four levels of menus for any function have proven over time to deliver optimal performance," says Mark Skoog, director of marketing for Syntellect (Phoenix, AZ).

Skoog suggest working with a small, manageable focus group of approximately ten people to efficiently test IVR scripts.

"The idea is not to spend a long period of time trying to analyze statistics and put together a big plan," he says. "The idea is to test [your menus] quickly and modify [them] from there."

You might also hire an outside consultant to organize a focus group that can provide an unbiased opinion on your IVR script's user-friendliness. Otherwise, Skoog suggests looking inside your organization and outside of your call center.

"Don't find people who are already familiar with your scripts," he advises. "They have preconceived notions about how the scripts should work."

Most customers can probably use touchtone menus to handle basic tasks, like finding the price of a product, without opting out to receive live help. But reducing the number of calls that require agent assistance doesn't mean that you need to downsize your agent staff.

"A successful IVR script is not one that reduces head count at your call center, but one that increases the business levels of the organization," says Fred Manus, marketing manager, Nortel Networks (Brampton, Ontario, Canada).

To illustrate his point, Manus recalls how a major brokerage used an IVR system with a speech recognition engine to provide stock quotes to callers. He says that because callers find stock prices more quickly by requesting them from an IVR system than from agents, callers began checking more prices than they had before and did more trading with the firm. But the firm kept every agent employed at its call center to provide customers with additional assistance.

Start Your Speech Recognition Engines

Speech recognition engines are as essential to a speech-enabled IVR system as a mechanical engine is to your car. You use the speech rec engine to build apps to handle the different ways that customers phrase requests. But you don't need to do this app development alone.

"It's rare that you'll find a call center manager and his development team creating [speech recognition] apps from the ground up," says Marcello Typrin, group product marketing manager for Nuance Communications (Menlo Park, CA). "So it's best to work with a vendor directly."

When you're browsing for a speech recognition engine, consider asking vendors about what consulting services they offer. And before you license a speech rec engine, confirm that the vendor keeps its technology current.