Household appliance manufacturer Kenwood DeLonghi is using speech recognition and voice automation to handle common enquiries at its customer call centre.

The company wanted to automate the handling of repetitive calls to free staff to deal with more difficult problems and improve customer service.

It is using Telephonetics VIP’s Virtual Contact Centre Agent to deliver self-service facilities to customers.

Kenwood will reduce call centre operations costs and improve efficiency as the allocation of some repair staff will be automatically handled, says company spokesman Jeff Turner.

‘We believe speech recognition and voice automation can deliver the anticipated return on investment and meet our ongoing automation requirements,’ he said.

‘We were well aware of the benefits speech self-service can offer but also wanted to ensure that any implementation would not cause disruption to the level of service we provide to our customers.’

The software will also give Kenwood DeLonghi a better understanding of demand for its repair services.