True Corporation has overhauled its core contact centre infrastructure with a 2-billion-baht budget in a move to address the ailing customer satisfaction record industry-wide.
The outlay is also aimed at handling increasingly sophisticated convergent services as well as much higher call volumes, said Carl Goodier, chief of customer service for True.
Yesterday True launched what it claimed to be Thailand's first automated speech recognition service in Thai language for its call centre to improve service quality. Speech recognition enhances call centre capabilities and delivers automated services over the phone.
"This could make our interactions more natural and shorten call times, improving our overall call centre services," said Mr Goodier.
Automated speech recognition service has been widely adopted in the US, Europe and developed countries in Asia, he said. True decided to adopt the technology from Japan after spending two and a half years implementing it.
Speech recognition is meant to provide customers the information they need quickly, as sometimes they do not need to speak to a live operator. Consumers requiring basic information are automatically directed to the speech recognition system, which determines the nature of the inquiry through a series of prompts.
"After testing the system in March, we found our customer satisfaction index has improved from 40% to 60% through the use of automatic interactive voice response," Mr Goodier said.
The accuracy rate for the speech recognition system stands at 95%, compared with an average of 85% for a conventional call centre system.
Mr Goodier said the new call centre system would serve 23.4 million True Move mobile postpaid customers. Customers using prepaid services, pay-TV cable and broadband internet will be allowed to access the service next year, as True plans to use a single customer service number for the whole group.