VeWoz
VeWoz, also known as the Wizard Of Oz, is a tool developed by VeCommerce to allow simulation of an open speech routing application without adversely impacting the caller experience. VeWoz is useful for:
- reviewing the Voice User Interface – persona & prompts – before committing to a system design,
- evaluating the efficacy and caller experience of a proposed system design,
- conducting a demand analysis of large volumes of customer responses to an open "How can we help you?" question. This can be used as input to a skills-based routing design or a Lean process review activity.
- collecting caller utterances to bootstrap the statistical model that sits behind the open speech router, allowing high recognition performance from deployment, and
- allowing human monitoring of the open speech routing application during the calibration phase prior to deployment with the ability to correct misrecognitions in real time.
VeWoz allows callers to interact with what they believe to be an automated computer system with their calling experience controlled and protected by an unseen human being. The key advantage of this methodology is that callers behave as they would to a deployed, high-accuracy automated system without first requiring development of that system.
How it works
VeCommerce deploy a VeWoz system to the client premises with the client ACD routing a proportion of inbound calls. Calls are answered by the VeWoz system, controlled by a number of human agents familiar with or trained in the client business and running VeWoz GUI (Graphical User Interface) software from onsite PCs.
VeCommerce preloads the VeCommerce GUI with a map corresponding to the client's existing IVR or existing queue structure, allowing the human agent to select the most appropriate queue for the clients request with VeWoz instigating a transfer directly to that queue. Where the caller provides insufficient information for the human agent to make a routing decision, the agent may instigate a disambiguation prompt to be played to the caller – eg ‘Was that business, personal or phone banking?', listen to the callers response and transfer the caller.
Customer Deliverables
Deliverables for the client organisation are determined with VeCommerce before each VeWoz exercise, depending on the client's needs. Available deliverables during or at the completion of the VeWoz exercise include:
- Raw caller utterance wave files
- Transcribed utterance wave files
- Aggregation of caller requests with analysis of frequency and complexity
- Analysis of the efficacy of the Voice User Interface
- Estimates of the expected accuracy and completion rate of the deployed system
Additionally the VeWoz exercise can be followed by a survey of the callers once they have completed their intended task by transfer to a live agent or by using a call back strategy. This survey may be designed to obtain qualitative feedback on the persona, the prompts and the caller experience in general.
Did You Know?
In a recent study, 33% of those asked found PINs to be especially vulnerable as an identity process because typically, information used for PINs is easy to guess.