EchoStar Seeks Edge in Helping Callers

Looking for an edge against its direct-broadcast satellite opponent, DirecTV Inc., EchoStar Communications Corp. is readying a broad rollout of an automated speech-recognition phone system that it hopes will close the customer-service gap on its bigger rival.

There has been talk in recent weeks that the two providers — DirecTV is bigger, with 15 million customers — could be exploring a merger, even though regulators shot down EchoStar’s 2002 attempt to buy DirecTV. But for now, the fight for customers between the two satellite providers is as fierce as ever.

EchoStar — which operates the Dish Network service, with 12.3 million subscribers — said boosting the number of customers calls it handles automatically will not only trim operating expenses but also increase overall satisfaction rates.

“It’s not about avoiding the calls,” said EchoStar chief information officer Rob Strickland. “It’s about providing customers faster time to resolution.”

Today, EchoStar isn’t as efficient as DirecTV at processing phone calls. Last year EchoStar handled about 32% of its 135 million customer calls using automated systems. DirecTV, with 15.4 million subscribers, receives about 120 million calls per year into its customer-service center and has an “interactive voice-response containment rate” of 39%, according to spokesman Robert Mercer.

Until last year, in fact, EchoStar had no automated call features for its tech-support line, according to Strickland. Callers were connected to the next available agent, even for simple questions, like how to order a pay-per-view program.

The two other primary categories of calls handled by the centers — billing and sales — had some automation, but used a 7-year-old system that prompted callers with touch-tone phone menus (e.g., “press one for your account balance”).

At the same time, Dish subscribers aren’t as happy with their service as DirecTV’s are. According to the J.D. Power and Associates 2005 satellite and cable TV customer satisfaction study, Dish had a score of 708 out of 1,000 possible points, slightly lower than DirecTV’s 716 points.

EchoStar also has seen its monthly customer-disconnect rate increase this year — to 1.57% for the first three months of 2006, compared with 1.44% for the first quarter last year — while DirecTV reduced its monthly churn for the same periods, to 1.45% from 1.49%.

Strickland joined EchoStar in May 2005, after serving as president of application monitoring-software vendor Silas Technologies, now called VSR Networks, whose customers include EchoStar.

One of his first mandates was to find a way to offload more calls from the company’s 9,000 agents now located at 11 centers in the U.S., India and the Philippines. “A 2% increase in automated call handling will result in about 1 million [fewer] calls to our agents,” Strickland said.

To do that, the Englewood, Colo.-based company is looking to phone systems that rely on speech-recognition technology to let customers navigate menus by talking instead of pushing buttons on their phones.

In August 2005, EchoStar launched a project based on a speech-recognition system from Intervoice, running on 20 clustered Hewlett-Packard servers at four sites. The company spent $8.4 million on the project, the first phase of which was completed in January.

Initially, EchoStar introduced two key speech-recognition applications for tech support: one that helps customers program their Dish Network remote controls (for example, to control their TV sets), and another that provides answers to frequently asked questions, such as how to record a show on a digital video recorder.

Prerecorded prompts walk a customer through various configuration or troubleshooting tasks, the way a live agent would, asking if callers are ready to move to the next step (to which they reply “yes” or “no”). One change the EchoStar team made in the design stage of the project: The robot needed to wait longer — about six seconds — before asking if someone had completed a step; at first, the system piped up after two seconds.

“We had to account for the time it took people to walk to their TVs,” Strickland explained.

With the new system, the automated call-handling rate for technical support calls is now 15%, Strickland claimed. He estimated that the first phase of the project, which included a redesigned main menu, will offload 1.3 million calls per year from agents, saving $4.5 million.

A second phase of EchoStar’s voice-recognition project is scheduled to go live by the end of this year to provide applications for billing questions, changing service plans and assisting Dish Network field-service installers. By 2007, EchoStar expects to have 23 applications running on the Intervoice system, including a natural-language program that greets callers with an open-ended question (“Welcome to EchoStar. How may I help you?”) and picks out key words or phrases after someone speaks a full sentence.

But on this front, too, EchoStar trails DirecTV. Mercer said DirecTV earlier this year introduced a natural-language speech-recognition system from call-center application vendor West Interactive Corp. for handling some customer-service functions. He added that DirecTV has used speech recognition to let subscribers order pay-per-view shows for more than a year.

EchoStar’s Strickland hopes his robot phone agents will drive the overall rate of automated call handling toward 40% — and bring it on par with DirecTV.

If that happens, EchoStar could reduce the number of call-center staff it needs by 13%, or about 1,200 agents, although Strickland noted the company would likely shift agents to support new products such as its “DishNow” pre-paid service.

But do people really want to chat with a machine? Yes, said Strickland, because they can get what they want faster. For one thing, they’re not shy about interrupting a robot. Said Strickland: “Customers want a well-defined voice application that’s more Web-like.”