NEWS RELEASE
29 September 2004
Call Centre Expo Conference presentation at 2.30pm
Littlewoods Bet Direct increases customer satisfaction and reduces costs
with implementation of speech recognition solution ‘NoQ’ from
VeCommerce
The Operations Director of Littlewoods Bet Direct, Phil Morgan, today described how his
business has successfully increased customer satisfaction and reduced business costs
by implementing a speech recognition solution called ‘NoQ’ from VeCommerce.
Speaking at the Conference at Call Centre Expo at the NEC in Birmingham, Phil Morgan
was joined by Ro Iyengar, Managing Director of VeCommerce UK to describe the
strategy behind the decision to implement speech recognition, the challenges that
needed to be overcome and what the commercial returns have been.
Littlewoods Bet Direct is a division of the Liverpool based company Littlewoods Gaming.
Bet Direct operates a telephone, web and interactive TV bookmaking service and has
over 300,000 registered account holders. It offers a full range of fixed odds betting and
the call centre receives over 2.5 million calls annually, delivering around 80% of its
revenue.
Phil Morgan said: “Our telephony channel is a key part of our business, despite calls
being event and season driven, giving major peaks and troughs in call levels. On busy
days races occur every fifteen minutes throughout the day and we can see a mad rush
from punters wanting to place a bet just before a race.”
Bet Direct profiled it’s customer base into three categories, premier, ‘high roll’ customers,
profitable ‘medium stake’, and unprofitable ‘low stake’ customers.
“For each £5 bet placed, 83% is returned to the punter, of the remaining 65p, 15% goes
to the government and 10% to the Horse Racing Levy Board, leaving less that 50p from
which to run the business,” continued Morgan. “This means that we are very focused on
reducing our running costs, particularly for the low stake customers. We can’t afford to
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lose premier callers at a time when there is a rush to place bets, so we needed to
implement a solution that would give priority to premier callers and automate more of the
calls from the low stake punters.”
During the Grand National in 2001, Bet Direct trialled a limited funtionality speech
recognition system from VeCommerce for a fixed range of bet types and for a fixed
number of runners. It proved very successful and gave them the confidence to extend it
to all UK racing and other major sports.
VeCommerce is a global leader in the provision of natural language speech recognition
(NLSR), speaker verification and voice enabled e-commerce solutions. The company
has voice-enabled the business systems of many large organisations around the world,
providing easy to use, consistently available self service facilities for customers. A caller
can simply speak in a natural conversational tone over any telephone, significantly
reducing the cost of each transaction. The company had already developed a
commercial voice betting system called VeBet which had been extensively used in
Australia and this was converted to support the UK’s way of placing a bet. The service
was branded ‘NoQ’ to reflect the speeding up of the betting process, avoiding having to
queue.
In developing the system, NoQ had to take into account the numerous UK regional
accents and the jargon peculiar to the betting world. It now supports the 60,000
registered horse names, teams and player names, including mispronunciations, can
incorporate real time updates to race day tables, changes in runners and prices and
gives real time links to banks. The persona is snappy yet conveys confidence, interacts
with callers in the same way as an agent, can put questions that will elicit the desired
response and can help callers when they make a mistake.
Phil Morgan continued: “NoQ went live in April 2003. Although it was designed for the
low value customers, all of our customers use it. We have taken over 500,000 bets since
the launch and 400,000 calls with a success rate of 75%. Over 80% of stakes are placed
on the horses, but we also take bets on football, rugby, dogs and many other sports.
NoQ has helped us to reduce our operating costs and to manage our peaks without
having to increase staff levels. Our customers like the system – it offers anonymity and
good functionality and the response level is quick.”
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Ro Iyengar said: “Bet Direct have seen direct benefits from implementing NoQ, including
cost savings and an improved customer experience. The use of speech solutions can
bring significant benefits to companies with high volume, routine transactions.”
The presentation was given on the first day of the Call Centre Expo Conference on
Wednesday 29 September at 2.30pm at the NEC in Birmingham.
-endsContact:
Sue Viney
Viney Communications
0118 934 2093
07774 267280
sue@vineycommunications.co.uk
Notes to Editors
1.
Photos of Ro Iyengar and Phil Morgan available as high res jpeg files. Please
contact Sue Viney on 0118 934 2093 or sue@vineycommunications.co.uk for a
copy
2.
VeCommerce is an Australian based company with over 20 years experience in
the provision of natural language speech recognition and voice enabled ecommerce solutions. The business solution enables consumers simply to say
what they want to an organisation’s computer systems using any telephone. This
results in complicated but ‘routine’ transactions being completed automatically,
significantly reducing the cost of each transaction whilst enhancing customer
satisfaction through an easy to use, friendly and consistent service. Clients
include SunCorp, Pizza Hut and the Australian Tax Office in Australia, Ministry of
Social Development in New Zealand, Magna Entertainment Corporation in the
USA and Littlewoods Bet Direct in the UK. VeCommerce set up a UK office in
Maidenhead, Berkshire in 2002.