Greater Productivity in Less Time By: Linda Marquardt, Parlance Corporation, lbm@nameconnector.com .

In this time of eroding customer service and the constant need for greater efficiency, those of us charged with the communications needs of our practices face an ongoing challenge. However, speech recognition solutions and service can provide a legal practice of any size and scope with the means to ensure both external clients and internal employees can reach each other quickly and efficiently, wherever they are located, and spend less time doing it.

With many organizations, clients calling in must either ask an operator to be connected to the person they’re trying to reach or navigate an auto attendant by trying to spell a name or remember an extension. Operators may be busy with other external and internal calls, and may only be staffed during specific hours. Auto attendants may only allow callers to reach an office number – and our mobile workforces are often not in their offices.

Internal callers must often access a directory to find the extension/number they are seeking, call an operator to be connected or check a long list of numbers in a cell phone. Adding cell numbers, pager numbers, and home office numbers exacerbates the connection situation.

A speech recognition solution provides a firm’s employees and clients with simple, spoken-name access to each other at any time of day – and at any location. Calls are answered on one ring, 7x24x365, and the need to check a directory, dial more than one number, spell an unfamiliar name, or remember a pager’s PIN goes away. Receptionists and operators can now focus on calls which require specific assistance – and can spend up to 90% less time taking calls in the first place.

For those who manage and maintain telecom networks, this solution allows you to extend your voice network by including cell phones, home phones and pagers, and to customize networks for specific groups of callers – without changing your core network. You no longer have to publish and maintain directories – and changes to your registry are administered in seconds from the web. You have 7/24 monitoring of your network and performance reports that ensure your system is performing optimally – and this service is part of the solution, so you and your employees’ time can be spent elsewhere. Since callers use a name instead of a number to reach each other, network changes can be made with minimal impact to the users – they simply continue to say a name to connect, just as they did prior to the change.

We’re all looking for ways to provide excellent service to our clients and employees, but also want to ensure our time and dollars are spent appropriately. Allowing a speech technology solution to offload your receptionist/operator’s time and reduce the time spent connecting throughout your organizations is one way to streamline your telecomm system – and allow you more time to spend on other responsibilities.

Editor: Debra F. Goldman (DGoldman@GMLJ.com) (This publication is the property of the Atlanta Association of Legal Administrators. Reproduction or reprint without prior permission is strictly prohibited. Click here to request reprint permission.)

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