Call centers are the obvious place to add speech-enabled systems, but be realistic.

At CDS Inc., a division of the $4 billion publishing giant Hearst Corp. based in Des Moines, Iowa, which handles subscriptions for roughly 350 magazines, Senior Product Manager Marc Francisco saw an opportunity to use speech software to automate simple functions.

"We started with an application that would let the customer identify him or herself, so that when they got to the service rep, he or she would have all the customer's information," Francisco said.

That alone reduced live agent call length by about 20 seconds, he said, which translated to roughly 10 percent in savings. Then the company expanded the service to handle change-of-address requests. "That's the top call we get," Francisco said, "and it can't be handled in a touch-tone environment because it's fairly complex."

Designing the user interface "was an art," Francisco said. "There is a lot of work that goes into writing the prompts and in determining how to guide the caller."

At first, for example, CDS' main menu gave callers a list of voice command options, such as "change address" or "renew subscription," but "callers were saying 'yes' instead of picking one of those choices," Francisco said. "We needed to work with speech experts to make sure the prompts were successful."

Because the change-of-address calls happen seasonally, automating that function reduced the need to hire and train temporary workers.

So how many customers prefer an automated agent over a live one? None. But when faced with the option of waiting several minutes for a live agent or being serviced immediately by a droid, 43 percent of customers will choose option two, according to Gartner.

Wyndham hasn't conducted a formal customer satisfaction survey, but Mussa said the proof of its success is in the number of calls the automated system handles. "We expected the system to handle 5 or 6 percent of the calls, but it's actually taking as much as 18 percent," he said. Of course, the system doesn't exactly make it easy to get to a live agent, even if you really want to.

In any event, it has allowed the company to cut 40 people from its service rep staff of 150, and shave nearly 15 percent from call center payroll. What's more, Mussa said, because the system handles the simple, routine calls, live agents can spend more time upselling other customers.

A handful of companies are looking to leverage speech applications outside the call center. At BNSF Railway Co., a subsidiary of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. based in Fort Worth, Texas, Shannon McGovern, the firm's director of network support systems, oversees one of the company's seven speech applications, called Automated Train Reporting. "We needed a method of capturing train reporting information from about 10,000 conductors riding the trains," she said.

Typically, that information includes a car's location and contents. In the past, that data was delivered via telephone or radio to a live employee, who then keyed the information into an online database used by BNSF customers to track the location of their goods, and by BNSF to plan its operations. But inputting all that data took time, and often introduced errors into the system.

"Our customers need to know when they should schedule people to unload their containers, so the more timely the information we can provide, the better they can plan ahead," she said. Now, conductors relay the necessary data via mobile phone or radio to an automated system, which updates the database instantly.

But it wasn't easy, mainly because conductors operate in environments that aren't optimal for speech recognition. "You have the bell whistles at the crossings, not to mention the train engines. It's extremely noisy," McGovern said. It took several tries to get the system to work, and the company finally settled on a version that asks a series of very detailed questions and requires only brief input from the conductors. McGovern said roughly 75 percent of the calls are error-free. She couldn't estimate hard savings, but said the system has vastly improved customer service.

When Will It Work? When Will It Be Worth the Work?

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