TELECOMS
Client
Saudi Telecom Company (STC) is effectively the national telco for KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), with about 17,000 staff.
Program/Project
Replace part of existing DTMF menu structure with Natural Language Call Steering, for limited caller population, to help introduce STC senior management to speech-enablement. Support Arabic speakers only.
My Role
User Interface Design Lead for all aspects. I had tagging support from native Arabic speakers, from UAE and Jordan.
My Responsibilities
Supported Senior Director meetings with client in Riyad, KSA. Presented our experience with speech enablement of telco IVRs to client’s Head of Call Center Operations.
Created concept classification for tagging. I tagged utterances, once translated to English.
Presented Tagging Review workshop remotely to client team.
Supported limited deployment, then presented summary findings from real calls.Challenges & Opportunities
The client was conducting the project on a low-profile basis, to lobby more cautious senior colleagues, based on findings from real callers. This created several challenging constraints:
> very limited budget/timescale
> limited access to staff, and none to customers. No face-to-face Tagging Review workshops.
> very limited budget/timescale
> limited access to staff, and none to customers. No face-to-face Tagging Review workshops.
For budget reasons, the client contracted for a very small number of tags, but it was neither realistic nor sensible to constrain the tagging in this way. I devised a new approach, which satisfied the contract, while also helping the client team understand the value-add of a larger set of tags.
The team’s native Arabic tagging experience was limited, so I created a hybrid approach, with 2 native Arabic speakers tagging the original utterances in Arabic, me tagging English translations, then all of us reviewing together.