Leader: Self-service? Feign that old-fashioned phone

Why offshore to call centres employing cheap labour when software can do the same job at an even lower cost?

That's the promise of some vendors touting self-service CRM technology. RightNow Technologies CEO Greg Gianforte said as much when visiting silicon.com a couple of weeks ago, pointing to knock-on effects of using his brand of customer relationship management.

And this week has even seen one well-known analyst house suggest this applies to a channel most people know well, the telephone.

Datamonitor has forecast speech-enabled self-service will more than double as a market, to become worth $1.2bn in North America by 2008 and $1bn in Europe, the Middle East and Africa by the same year.

We hear about bigger markets all the time but that certainly isn't chump change.

But is it realistic? Web-based self-service is in many ways already tried and tested. How many of us use FAQs, Q&A sections and more advanced sections of websites rather than talk to another human? Quite a few, we bet.

The organisations that set up their services this way - and there are many - know the bottom line difference such an approach makes.

But are we going to say that, at those moments when we have to use a phone or want to 'press for an agent to call you', we think speech-recognition is going to work? For some functions maybe. But for many others, it'll only be another obstacle before we get through to a real person, whether they're based in South Shields or South Africa.

The cost of call using speech automation software may be 15 to 25 per cent that of a call handled by an agent in India, as Datamonitor says, but when that can be a cost in addition to a subsequent call to a call centre it is easy to see why many organisations will take a wait-and-see approach.

A lot of people will keep on pressing 0 to speak to an operator - or pretending they don't have a touch tone phone.