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NativeAccent Pilot StudyThe Call-Center ChallengeOne of India’s significant business challenges in its growing call-center operations is to scale its human resources to support its fast-paced growth. In particular, identifying and training call center representatives is a serious gating factor, due to the large number of trainees and the shortage of qualified voice and accent instructors. The quality of the English spoken by call center representatives is a significant competitive advantage for organizations, and hence maintaining – or further improving – this high quality level is crucial to organizations’ continued call-center success. As a result, Carnegie Speech recently ran a pilot study with a leading call center to evaluate the functional and cost effectiveness of Carnegie Speech’s pronunciation software, NativeAccentTM. The primary goals of the pilot study were to examine the software’s impact on training effectiveness and trainer time. The secondary goals were to determine how to best use NativeAccentTM in the organization’s voice and accent training, and to evaluate the software’s ease-of-use. The results were positive on all counts. MethodologyThe basic methodology of the study was to use the NativeAccentTM software to train a voice and accent class on half of the difficult sounds of English and on word stress. The human facilitator trained the same class on the other half of the difficult sounds of English and on grammar and soft skills. ResultsAccording to the pre- and post-training assessments, the voice and accent training using Native AccentTM was extremely effective. Of the 24 students, all either improved (75%) or remained the same (25%). No student’s scores worsened. In addition, the training greatly improved the students’ performance on the two areas that were most in need of improvement (see figure). 88% of the students passed the “Articulation” portion of the post-training assessment where only 33% of the students passed on the pre-training assessment. Similarly, 96% of the students passed the “Pace and pausing” section of the post-training assessment as compared to 21% on the pre-training assessment. These results were shown to be statistically significant.
The software also has the potential to decrease the required facilitator time by up to 64%. In the 27.5-hour curriculum that was implemented in the pilot study, 17.5 hours were spent in tutoring the difficult sounds of English or tutoring word stress. Since these are the skills that NativeAccentTM teaches, the facilitator does not need to spend class time in these areas. This decrease in required facilitator time could be used by the call center to either train more employees in the same amount of time, thereby decreasing throughput costs, or to give more individualized instruction to students on particular problem areas, contributing to further quality increases. The secondary goals of the study were also achieved in that the organization’s voice and accent team produced a curriculum for the study that was effective, even on its first implementation. In addition, the facilitator and the students found the software easy to use and required little training. As a result, the call center concluded that Carnegie Speech’s NativeAccentTM would be a valuable addition to their training process. In this study, Carnegie Speech’s NativeAccentTM software demonstrated significant functional and cost effectiveness in crucial areas of voice and accent training. In addition, the software provides an easily implementable solution to address the organization’s core business challenges of scalability and quality in voice and accent training. Contact:Angela Kennedy, CEO 437 Grant Street, Ste. 918 |
