Case study: BT uses open source BI to support its voicemail system

BT has deployed open source software to support its voicemail system, which currently serves around eight million UK customers.

With the help of systems integrator Unisys, the telco deployed Jaspersoft ’s open source business intelligence (BI) software in its statistical data warehouse (SDW) around 18 months ago, following an initial six-month development project around the source code.

About 50 employees currently use Jaspersoft to query and report on data stored in BT’s vast voicemail database. Staff can analyse mailbox and message counts by class of service, service provider, and usage level and frequency, for example, and produce and distribute reports quickly and easily in multiple formats, which include PDF, Excel, Word and CSV.

This has helped the telco reduce the time it previously took to research and respond to its voice mail customer queries, and to lower the cost of producing ad hoc reports that were previously available only either in standard, daily formats or obtained by submitting a special request to Unisys.

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US Court rules a bank can be sued for their failure to adopt multi-factor authentication

Late last month an Illinois District Court ruled a bank can be sued for their failure to adopt multi-factor authentication and concluded the bank breached its duty to protect the Plaintiffs' account against fraudulent access, and if the bank's failure to adopt multi-factor authentication caused fraudulent access to plaintiffs' account, it could be held liable for negligence.

In 2007, a hacker gained access to the plaintiffs' online accounts by using the plaintiffs’ username and password. The hacker ordered a $26,500 advance on the plaintiffs’ home equity line of credit, which was transferred to a bank in Austria. When the theft was discovered and the funds traced, the Austrian bank refused to return the money.

Citizens Bank notified the plaintiffs that it intended to hold them liable for the harm. The online banking agreement between Citizens and the plaintiffs stated "We will have no liability to you for any unauthorized payment or transfer made using your password that occurs before you have notified us of possible unauthorized use and we have had a reasonable opportunity to act on that notice." Citizens billed the plaintiffs for the $26,500, and when failed to pay the balance on time, Citizens reported the account as delinquent to credit bureaus, and threatened to foreclose on their home, if the plaintiffs continued to refuse to make payments.

The plaintiffs sued Citizens, claiming that the bank's actions violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act (15 U.S.C. § 1681, et seq.), the Truth in Lending Act (15 U.S.C. § 1601, et seq.), the Electronic Funds Transfer Act (15 U.S.C. § 1693 et seq.) and constituted common law negligence.

The Court ruled, "In light of Citizens' apparent delay in complying with FFIEC security standards, a reasonable finder of fact could conclude that the bank breached its duty to protect Plaintiffs' account against fraudulent access[,]" and if the bank's failure to adopt multi-factor authentication caused fraudulent access to plaintiffs' account, it could be held liable for negligence.”

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The Advantages of On-Demand Speech Technology

SpeechTEK 2009:This year's closing keynote panel examines speech solutions delivered via the software-as-a-service model.

Early in the session, Nancy Jamison, a market analyst for Jamison Consulting, asked panelists to define what made the hosted model unique.

RJ Auburn, chief technology officer for Voxeo, said that one of the big advantages of managed services and SaaS is the ability to provide redundancy — even in a hybrid or on-premises implementation. He cited as an example a contact center that handles its typical call volume via on-premises ports, but rents extra ports from a vendor to handle seasonal spikes in trafiic. The contact center can use its own ports the rest of the year, possibly saving some money without sacrificing the control provided by the on-premises option.

SaaS models also allow enterprises to leverage technologies that might be too complex and/or too expensive to implement themselves. Paul Watson, general manager of multichannel and self-care solutions for Convergys, pointed specifically to speaker verification as one such example. Installed as an on-premises technology, Watson argued, voice biometrics can require prohibitive capital investment for licensing, infrastructure, and training; not only does the SaaS model address those concerns, he said, but it makes the technology more manageable and quicker to implement.

Jamie Bertasi, the senior vice president of enterprise at Microsoft subsidiary Tellme, said that one of the biggest advantages of SaaS and managed solutions is the ability to tune a system with every call, quickly and efficiently, making that system more powerful over time.

Voxify Executive Vice President Daniel Reed agreed, adding that a managed-services environment also enables vendors to “aggregate data for the benefit of individuals.” In other words, a vendor draws from the well of its experience, making increasing its competence and capabilities with each deployment.

Auburn, Reed's colleague at Voxeo, noted another advantage of a hosted environment: technology updates and the ability to keep systems and platforms evergreen with the latest advances. Some contact centers. he pointed out, are running legacy hardware but competing against newer, easier systems. “There are a lot of old, scary boxes sitting in basements [for 10 years at a time]," he said. "Having the technology move forward is very, very valuable.”

The panel agreed broadly that one of the main advantages of SaaS is speed of deployment, but also cautioned that sufficient attention must be paid to the implementation.

“Talk to people about their experience with speech and you’ll get very mixed results,” Tellme's Bertasi said. “We can be fast all we want, but if it doesn’t work — whatever the reasons are that things go wrong — we’re not, and our clients are not, going to achieve [our] goals.”

Bertasi also argued that systems continuing to move callers through the call flow in a very serial manner miss the point entirely. Good design, she said, helps users achieve goals quickly.

Despite the panel’s consensus on some matters, the stage also saw its share of occasional disagreement. Panelists, speaking to an audience of potential customers, vied to push their messages and wares within the allotted time constraints.

In one exchange, as Convergys's Watson had begun to wrap up an overview of his company's offerings, Voxeo's Auburn pointedly asked how many of Convergys’s ports were VoiceXML-enabled. Watson replied that he didn’t have an exact figure, but that it was above 50 percent. The exchange was polite but also illustrative of how competitive the hosted space -- with its multiplicity of vendors and plans from which to choose -- can be.

40% of callers avoid speech systems wherever possible

Many consumers avoid using speech automated systems when calling customer call centres and prefer to use the Internet as their first port of call. In fact, one-third of consumers surveyed struggle to see any benefits to using an automated contact centre service, representing a rise on last year’s figures.

Most consumers also believe companies only use automated services in their contact centres to save money. Furthermore, two in five people claim they are unhappy with the automated systems’ ability to deal with queries.

These are some of the highlights of the 2009 Alignment Index for Speech Self-Service report releasedby Dimension Data in conjunction with Cisco, and Microsoft subsidiary, Tellme Networks Inc.

The report, which compares and measures consumer, vendor and enterprise perceptions of speech systems, reveals that of 2,000 consumers polled across six countries* some 40% - up from 36% in 2008 - said they avoid using speech systems “whenever possible”, while 50% said they use the Internet as their first choice for interacting with a business or organisation.

And with only 25% of consumers saying they would be happy to use speech solutions again, organisations are not winning their hearts and minds.

When using automated systems, over a third of consumers that were polled are most frustrated when a human agent requests they repeat themselves after they’ve already provided information to the automated system. And 19% of consumers say that they are most annoyed when the system doesn’t recognise what they’ve said.

On the other hand, companies that have deployed speech recognition are fairly optimistic about the long-term viability of such systems for customer service. They believe the path to improving customer satisfaction with speech recognition lies in making it easier for consumers to use the systems.

Looking at consumer behaviours, the report statistics indicate that attitudes toward customer service among the younger age groups are changing. Over half of consumers between the ages of 16 and 34 use an online channel for their customer service needs, and this will continue to place more pressure on companies to design customer service solutions that provide choice, accuracy and speed.

Verizon Business Extends Automated Speech Recognition Services to Internet Protocol Networks

To meet the needs of the growing number of businesses that are converting their networks to an Internet protocol infrastructure, Verizon Business is now offering its speech services in an IP-enabled version.

The new capability, announced Tuesday (Aug. 25), allows customers to run their speech services on the company's Hosted IP Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platform, as an alternative or in addition to its traditional Hosted IVR platform.

The services help callers conduct simple self-service inquiries and transactions over the phone. For example, a caller could use a speech application to check an account balance, find a store location, order literature, update an appointment, or inquire about an insurance claim -- all without having to wait on hold to speak to a customer service agent.

Voxeo and Nu Echo Announce Plan to Speed Development of Voice Applications

Starting today, Voxeo will offer Nu Echo's NuGram grammar development tool in an integrated package with Voxeo's VoiceObjects Service Creation Environment. This integration allows developers to easily create either static or dynamic grammars that can be used with VoiceObjects technology to efficiently build multichannel self-service applications.

The NuBot IVR Application Testing Solution Can Now Be Tried For Free

Most people know that IVR applications should be extensively tested before they’re deployed. They should be tested to make sure that they perform as specified and that they will continue to do so under load. Yet, most applications are not tested nearly as much as they should, sometimes with dire consequences when a major problem is detected after the application goes live. One reason for this, naturally, is cost. Another reason is time, as slips in the project schedule often mean less time available for testing.

That’s where automated testing comes in. Automated tests should be a critical element of any IVR testing strategy since they can greatly reduce the time required for application testing, lower development costs, accelerate software release cycles, and increase application quality and stability.

Unfortunately, commercially available testing offerings are usually costly, complex to set up and operate, or both, which is why they are so rarely used. To address this problem, we have developed the NuBot Automated IVR Application Testing Platform, which we demonstrated this week atSpeechTEK 2009in New York City. The NuBot Platform is an affordable automated IVR application testing solution that is both powerful and easy to use.

By calling 34 minutes per day Unlimited, is BT mis-selling?

I explore below a recent encounter with BT, my domestic telecoms provider, as an example of poor communication, product mis-selling and a strained attempt at using social media to mask customer service issues embedded in an organisation.

What's painful for me is that I actually quite like BT - cards on table: I used to work for them, I'm a shareholder and I think on the whole they have pretty good products. So I'm writing this with utmost transparency and a slight pang in my heart.

I may work in telecoms, but in real life I'm also just an ordinary consumer; I need consumer products and consumer levels of service. I should not have to rely on specialist knowledge to use and enjoy mass market products. I also value my time and like my dealings with companies to be efficient and organised.And I also have an interest in interaction design and business processes, especially in the field of customer service, because basically fixing and improving them is what I do for a job.

So, recently I became enagaged in a conversation with BT on Twitter, because I wanted to understand properly what the usage allowance was for BT Broadband talk (a domestic Voice over IP package) - a product for which use is quoted as "unlimited" with the customary asterisk by the side to mean "not REALLY unlimited" (see image).

Here's that twitter conversation word for word.

me: So, BT offers "*unlimited broadband talk calls if you redial" but quotes "abuse policy applies" - WHERE IS THIS POLICY? BT website sucks #fb

BTCare: Hi, have a look at this .. http://tiny.cc/0BQnd .. The info you are looking for is at bottom of the page..hope it helps


me: That's the page I'm complaining about! It says "Abuse policy applies" - WHERE is the policy!??? (i.e. original question) :-(

BTCare: It's at http://tinyurl.com/2dp8w6 under "Using the service", point 22 to 30. General abuse policy applies to all telephony.

me: thank you! I'd like to suggest that references to this policy on product pages are hyperlinked to it. That's how the web works ;-)

me: so to be clear: on BT Broadband Talk you can redial every 60 mins for free calls indefinitely and no monthly (abuse) cap applies...

BTCare: A Fair Usage Policy of 1000 minutes or 150 calls a month applies. www.bt.com/broadbandtalk for more info


me: thanks. So my next question is, how do you know how many broadband talk minutes you've used? is there a page to find out?

BTCare: There is no facility to monitor calls to be honest. As you can see though, you have alot of minutes to use on a monthly basis


me: "a lot" = subjective. So BBTalk allowance = 34 mins per day. Calling this "unlimited*" is tantamount to mis-selling. OFCOM's view?

at this point the conversation stopped - it seems BTCare had nothing more to say!

So, let me cover some of the basic errors in this mini-saga.

The First error is that which caused my problem in the first place - lack of clarity on the product pages at www.bt.com/broadbandtalk such as:

• mentioning something but not referencing it properly so I can find it
• writing a single paragraph covering two topics - leaving the reader wondering if the items are related or separate.

The issue here is that the paragaph in question (see first para in image above) starts by covering 0845 & 0870 numbers and then apparently changes in scope without being clear that it does so.

The second error, once the twitter conversation started, was the company didn't LISTEN to my question. I asked for the abuse policy - the response was to tell me where it is mentioned (the very page i was viewing), not where it is published.

The third error is the confusion caused by using the terms "abuse" and "fair use" to describe various forms of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour - this is like introducing some kind of "low-watermark" and "high-watermark" points as to acceptable behaviour. It's like telling a child some of their behaviour is "bad" and some of it is "unacceptable". That's confusing. I don't want that - just tell me what I can and can't do - just draw ONE line in the sand. I asked for the abuse policy because it seemed to that's what going over an allowance would be; turns out I need the fair use policy.

The fourth issue is that the company has "fair use" limits it expects you to abide by, and yet has no way of allowing you to monitor whether you are within those limits. This is patently ridiculous. Who ever heard of a car without a speedo, odometer and fuel guage? This is a 21st Century technology product, billed by usage, a usage you cannot track. It's not just ridiculous, it's verging on sharp practice.

Finally - the crux of my whole enquiry - the fair use (or as I thought, abuse) policy. What BT seems to have confirmed is that your "unlimited" allowance of minutes is actually limited to 1000 per month. It may seem a lot, as BTCare tried to point out, but that's actually under 34 minutes per day. (And please don't insult me by telling me how valuable call minutes are to me; in my world it's nowhere near "a lot").

Can they really be justified in calling this unlimited?

Ways forward

Setting my whole concern about the positioning of "unlimited minutes" itself, I fear this conversation is symptomatic of any large organisation that "talks the talk" as far as customer service is concerned, but fails to grapple with it effectively.

I spend much of my time working with organisations that are struggling in this way. The modern consumer is often a well-informed multi-channel being - often more informed than some of customer service represenatives of the organisation itself. This presents a challenge - and businesses need to rise to that challenge.

There's a bit of back-patting going on at BT over its use of twitter (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vj4BJR_LxWg), but responding on twitter is not really fixing anything. Rather it's implicitly acknowledging that there are cracks in service and attempting to paper over them. And it's not scalable either. Full marks for trying, but you haven't prevented the problem from occuring over and over again.

So, what are the kinds of things organisations like BT need to do to be effective at customer service:

• they need to listen, listen and listen again - properly
• continually improve the use of the right tools for content management and publishing, especially across multiple channels; including the training for how to publish customer facing content (I've written for bt.com in the past and know what's involved).
• you need a feedback loop; stop treating web pages of information as the answer to all questions just because it's cheap (this strategy reminds me very much of an anecdote from a bank that revoked its policy on being able to call branches.
  Caller: can I speak to my branch?
  Call Centre: sorry Madam, no. Anything they can answer, I can now answer for you.
  Caller: OK, I think i left my glasses there this morning - have you got them?)
• view customer service across channels (web, phone, twitter, IM, email) holistically, not as silos - viewing transfer across channels not so much as "escalation" but "unified communication" and embracing it and enabling it rather than denying it
• test self-service and assisted-service with real "use cases" of real customers - i.e. user centric design with workflows designed around the tasks customers want to complete not pathways designed around internal business processes.

No-one says this is easy - but nor is it impossible.

SRC is Awarded Digital Dictation and Speech Recognition Framework Agreement by NHS Yorkshire and Humber Collaborative Procurement Consortium

[Nik's comment: it has to be said, appointing 5 suppliers as the outcome of a tendering process seems rather like skipping the tendering process! We await annoucements from the other 3!]

SRC appointed as a supplier under a four year framework agreement with the NHS Yorkshire and Humber Collaborative Procurement Hub (YHCPC). This agreement covers the deployment of SRC's digital dictation, voice recognition and outsourced transcription solutions to over 200 Acute, Mental and Primary Care Trusts.

Doing what the brain does: how computers learn to listen

Researchers at the Leipzig Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London have now developed a mathematical model which could significantly improve the automatic recognition and processing of spoken language. In the future, this kind of algorithms which imitate brain mechanisms could help machines to perceive the world around them.

Many people will have personal experience of how difficult it is for computers to deal with spoken language. For example, people who "communicate" with automated telephone systems now commonly used by many organisations need a great deal of patience. If you speak just a little too quickly or slowly, if your pronunciation isn't clear, or if there is background noise, the system often fails to work properly. The reason for this is that until now the computer programs that have been used rely on processes that are particularly sensitive to perturbations. When computers process language, they primarily attempt to recognise characteristic features in the frequencies of the voice in order to recognise words.

"It is likely that the brain uses a different process", says Stefan Kiebel from the Leipzig Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. The researcher presumes that the analysis of temporal sequences plays an important role in this. "Many perceptual stimuli in our environment could be described as temporal sequences." Music and spoken language, for example, are comprised of sequences of different length which are hierarchically ordered.

According to the scientist's hypothesis, the brain classifies the various signals from the smallest, fast-changing components (e.g., single sound units like "e" or "u") up to big, slow-changing elements (e.g., the topic). The significance of the information at various temporal levels is probably much greater than previously thought for the processing of perceptual stimuli. "The brain permanently searches for temporal structure in the environment in order to deduce what will happen next", the scientist explains. In this way, the brain can, for example, often predict the next sound units based on the slow-changing information. Thus, if the topic of conversation is the hot summer, "su?" will more likely be the beginning of the word "sun" than the word "supper".