Persol Business Process Design Co., Ltd.
Persol Business Process DesignAs a BPO professional, we provide healthcare services such as administrative processing, IT help desks, call centers, and health support. With bases in Tokyo, Miyazaki, and Sasebo, we provide services tailored to the needs of our clients, focusing on providing support at client companies' bases and operating a highly cost-effective service desk using our Miyazaki No. 1 Outsourcing Center.
Issues to be addressed before introducing a voice recognition system
As the business expanded, the number of staff working at the call center increased, but the resources of the monitoring and evaluators could not be increased, and monitoring was a labor-intensive process in which the staff had to listen to each and every audio recording of hundreds of staff members. Due to the number of staff, there were limitations on the number of audio recordings that each person could monitor, and calibration between evaluators took a lot of time, so there were significant resource issues.
It was while facing these challenges that we came across AmiVoice Communication Suite Cloud. We had hopes that by introducing a voice recognition tool, we could improve our resource issues, enable fair evaluations based on uniform standards regardless of the skills or experience of the monitors and evaluators, and reduce the burden of providing feedback to staff.
Introduction of AmiVoice Communication Suite Cloud
Works Design Business Headquarters
Service Design Department
Service Strategy Department, Service Innovation Division
Mr. Kengo Uekusa
There were two evaluation points when considering the introduction. The first was the voice recognition rate. At first, I was skeptical about whether we could actually achieve a recognition rate at a level that would allow us to use automatic call evaluation. The second was the practicality of the automatic call evaluation function. We thought the key point was whether we could perform quality evaluation that was comparable to monitoring evaluations conducted by humans.
As for the speech recognition rate, we were able to achieve a 1% recognition rate after about a month of testing, including transcription and dictionary training. Although the training process was time-consuming, we had set a benchmark of 95% for deciding whether to introduce the system, so this did not affect the recognition rate.
Next is the quality evaluation function. The key point of the test was, "Can the monitoring evaluation done by human ears and the evaluation produced by the tool be similar?" We conducted the test by registering audio sources that had actually been monitored by humans in AmiVoice Communication Suite Cloud. By building our own unique monitoring evaluation logic and repeatedly fine-tuning the scores and weighting for each evaluation indicator, we were able to bring the tool's evaluation and human evaluation to a similar level. We decided that this could be fully utilized for monitoring, and so we decided to introduce it.
Automatic call evaluation to create monitoring reports
We are a strategic partner of HDI-Japan and are well versed in international certification standards. We also have many examiners who conduct inquiry desk rating surveys, and have a wealth of monitoring know-how. We use our own unique evaluation indicators (approximately 27 items) based on this know-how and register them in AmiVoice Communication Suite Cloud to conduct monitoring evaluations. Previously, monitoring evaluators manually wrote evaluation comments for each staff member in reports, but after the introduction of AmiVoice Communication Suite Cloud, report creation was automated. This has made it possible to significantly improve the efficiency of monitoring report work.
Significantly reduce monitoring man-hours. Improve staff awareness and further improve quality.
Works Design Business Headquarters
Service Design Department
Service Strategy Department, Service Innovation Division
Ms. Yuri Toyama
Previously, monitoring evaluators had to listen to each program one by one by hand, but now the evaluation can be done automatically, which has significantly reduced the amount of work required for monitoring.
When a person performs the evaluation, it takes at least 1 minutes to monitor one message, but with AmiVoice Communication Suite Cloud, it takes just a moment. When a person performs the evaluation, calibration of the evaluation criteria (about 30 hours per month) is required, but this has been reduced to zero. We expect to reduce the labor costs of more than 15 FTE in three months.
When we actually carried out the automatic evaluation, we noticed that there were many cases of text misrecognition due to fast or unclear speech. When listening to the audio of "Thank you for calling," where the "o" was not recognized, the "o" was actually pronounced weakly. Gradually, the idea that "words that the tool cannot recognize are difficult for people to hear" began to take hold, and we saw a clear increase in the number of staff members who spoke more clearly than before. This was an improvement that we had not anticipated before the introduction.
The staff being evaluated had raised concerns about the fairness of the evaluation, such as "the evaluation results differ depending on the evaluator" and "are they being evaluated based on likes and dislikes?", but these issues have been swept away. In addition, I think that the way evaluation results can be communicated using AmiVoice Communication Suite Cloud has also reduced the mental burden on the side of the feedback provider.
The fact that the content of the conversation was converted into text and the evaluation results were displayed on the screen seemed to have a considerable impact on the staff being evaluated. The introduction of AmiVoice Communication Suite Cloud has led to the revitalization of team-led improvement activities. This was an unexpected and welcome effect.
Coexistence of tools and people, effective operation through ingenuity
At first, I thought, "I wonder if the tool will be able to automatically output anything once it's installed," but when I actually used the tool, I realized that "it's important to leave some parts for human evaluation as well."
AmiVoice Communication Suite Cloud is designed to hit keywords from text data and evaluate them, so the impression of the call based on the tone and intonation of the voice must be confirmed by human ears. If a sentiment analysis function is implemented, it may be possible to evaluate this area, so we are looking forward to future additions to the function. "The importance of hybrid operation of tools and people" is a phrase that is often heard when talking about AI technology, and I think the same can be said about AmiVoice Communication Suite Cloud.
The most difficult part of introducing AmiVoice Communication Suite Cloud was preparing the training data through transcription learning. This takes time and money, but it is a task that cannot be avoided. After considering how to proceed with transcription learning, we decided to ask the staff who actually handle phone calls to do the transcription learning. The aim is to have them face the quality of our center's response head-on through the transcription learning work. Until now, there has been no opportunity for staff to listen to the actual audio source with their ears and follow the text with their eyes, and it is a truly valuable experience for the staff to feel like they are the monitors and evaluators themselves. Some of the audio sources that are the subject of transcription learning have excellent responses, while others require significant improvement. Being exposed to many good and bad examples leads to an increased awareness of quality improvement among staff.
Future prospects
We have created a monitoring system based on the concept of "service-minded service" that makes customers say "thank you." By comparing voice and text, we can understand the points that customers find troubling or pleased, as well as their emotions. By satisfying the psychological needs of our customers, we will continue to strive to provide friendly, courteous, and professional service that will make them say "thank you" many times.
When asked "What is the best experience you have had working here?", many of the staff answered "thanks from customers." Being thanked increases the motivation of staff. We plan to continue using AmiVoice Communication Suite Cloud to manage the quality of our staff's responses and their motivation.
Customer profile
Persol Business Process Design Co., Ltd.
Persol Business Process Design Co., Ltd. offers process design, organizational and human resource management,
We combine our three strengths in human resource development with AI and other technologies to provide BPO services that address our customers' challenges.
Our mission is to "innovate all jobs and organizations to create a society filled with better working environments."
We will contribute to realizing the future that the organization envisions and creating a society where working people can thrive.
