Inference Communications product manager and co-founder Callan Schebella.
The pizza franchise was given a secure web portal to work with, where they can log into from any location, and tweak their system to their desire, by creating new stores or removing old stores.
By using grammatical inference, this back-end process is automated and developing a solution takes just weeks.
This ability to personalize messages to specific callers stems from the enhanced intelligence of the technology and from the fact that the system is capable of leveraging the content of the organisation’s CRM database.
“This meant that instead of only being able to record a standard greeting and the usual instructional prompts, I was able to record multiple greetings and also had the flexibility to play those prompts in a randomised way to each caller,” Hell Pizza’s Hird said.
“This flexibility ensures the brand doesn’t get stale and keeps out customers engaged and interested. This is particularly important to our brand which is about being over the top and theatrical.”
The Inference Communications system not only automatically recognises how often customers have called but which store the have previously been connected to.
According to the company, 30 per cent of Australian businesses are using speech technology. Investment in the technology is poised to grow by 23 per cent per year over the next five years.
A surge in the uptake of speech technology around the world is being driven by advances in the technology like improved intelligence.
Search giant Google is pushing the trend too, through its implementation of GOOG411 service in the US.
The affordability is being driven by off-the-shelf software, external hosting providers and pay-as-you-go services models.
Schebella boasts that the system can be built cheaply, because their grammatical inference technology eliminates the need for translators and psychologists to come in and put voice data in a machine and that the constant data received via customers phone calls, enables the company to fine-tune their systems to better cope with the colourful Australian English.
“With grammatical inference we provide examples on what we want the system to understand and the machine will in real-time infer from those examples many thousands of ways of saying a particular phrase,” he said.
Starkie adds that standard voice xml platforms are used to run the technology on, so businesses don’t need anything out of the ordinary to deploy the application on.
“The system’s thinking is all done in advance, derived into a ‘language model’, and then clients chose what language model to feature in their system,” he said.
Now with six stores, Hell Pizza have been able to continually add stores, keeping the same call system, leading to improved customers satisfaction and a reduction in the length of calls times.
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