Alphanumerics on Qualyon Voicebot over the Phone

At many call centers, Inbound phone conversation often centers around checking status. And alphanumerics play a significant role.

Alphanumerics are combinations of alphabets and numbers. Whereas a telephone number is purely a number, a vehicle number such as KA01 MM 0001 has both alphabets and numbers.

For automated voice conversations, this has been an insurmountable problem, limiting the number of use cases where a Voicebot over the phone can be deployed. This is where the Qualyon Voicebot over the Phone outperforms the rest.

Some Examples

Let's say that a caller wants to know if her service ticket is getting handled, or check if a claim is getting processed. In these cases, the call center agent would ask for the ticket ID, which may be a number or an alphanumeric, then check the system for the status of the ticket, and inform the caller about the status.

It could be the caller requesting a policy copy to be emailed. Again, the call center agent would confirm the authenticity of the caller by verifying caller credentials. For a vehicle insurance policy copy, caller could be asked to tell the alphanumeric policy number and vehicle number.

If you would like to do web check-in over the phone, the airline reference number and the seat numbers are both alphanumeric.

These were examples of inbound calls. Outbound calls too have a need for alphanumerics sometimes. Imagine verifying some customer detail as part of customer on-boarding. An enterprise may call a new customer to confirm his/her tax identification id.

Technical Challenges

What makes it so difficult?

At Qualyon, we are passionate about the human language. We are constantly perfecting the Qualyon NLU (Natural Language Understanding) algorithm, so user intent is accurately understood.

There are significant challenges to handling alphanumerics. Lot of it has to do with how ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) works. People pronounce letters in various different ways. Some letters sound like words - oh, why, you, are, ex, tea, queue, bee, see, pee, we. People also group letters and numbers in unique ways (triple A 45 9 double 2).

And then you have the "helpful" hints people provide. Not everyone knows or remembers NATO phonetic alphabets (Alfa, Bravo, Charlie). One might say - A as in apple, and someone else might say, A as in Ahmedabad.

It gets more complicated when callers start talking to the system. "The second letter is B as in Box.". There are infinite such combinations, and Qualyon will continue to build on our current capabilities.

Introducing Qualyon Alphanumerics (Beta)

Qualyon Voicebots support alphanumerics now. Here are some functions that are available your voice script (some of which are India specific):

• Vehicle number

• Phone number

• Email

• Tax identification or PAN number

• National Identification, Passport or Aadhar numbers

• Name

• Address

• Pincode or zipcode

• City or State

• Dates

For the Techies: Any arbitrary alphanumeric or numeric can be handled using these

confirmNumeric, getNumeric (numDigits)
confirmAlphanumeric, getAlphanumeric (alphaNumTemplate)

In conclusion

Qualyon can handle your system queries, dealing with alphanumerics. Configure your IVR (telephony system in enterprises) to pass control to Qualyon. Qualyon will request caller for system specific ID, connect to your enterprise application and check status, and respond to your customer, and if required, connect the caller to your agent