VDAB (most comparable to the Dutch UWV) has exchanged the IVR for voice routing. As far as we know, VDAB is the first Flemish organization to structurally apply voice routing. This eliminates frequent internal transfers, among other things.

VDAB (Flemish Service for Employment and Vocational Training) is the Flemish equivalent of the Dutch UWV Werkbedrijf, the part of UWV that provides job placement and reintegration on behalf of the government. If your mission is to support Flemish citizens in the development of their careers, and you want to encourage citizens to develop their talents, then your services must be good and accessible. VDAB therefore wants to be an excellent and customer-oriented service provider.

“I think we're in relatively good shape,” says Niek Verlaan (Technical specialist Digital Services Department VDAB) about the image of the service. “We are innovative as a public service. The website scores well. We are, of course, a government agency; for example, many customers expect to have to go to an office for support from VDAB. We are a well-known brand in Flanders, but some employees and job seekers do not know exactly what they can turn to VDAB for.”

Job seekers and employers

Verlaan is responsible for all technology in the contact center of VDAB. It acts as the link between IT and the business, and is part of the customer contact organization that serves different groups: employers, job seekers and employees. Every month, the VDAB contact center handles about 70.000 contacts, the majority of which are people who register as job seekers or who need additional information. In addition, there are questions from job seekers who purchase coaching or training from VDAB. Employers also have contact, but mainly digitally, for example when they want to post a vacancy.

Social role

Verlaan: “VDAB naturally wants to make the customer experience as smooth as possible. That starts at the entrance: how do you, as a customer, find the right intermediary without too much effort? VDAB, more than commercial players in the field of job placement, training, education and coaching, has a pre-eminent social role.

Some of the clients have a somewhat weaker position on the labor market and we also deal with non-Dutch speaking job seekers. This group is not always 'digitally savvy' and VDAB's jargon does not always match the language skills of the target group either. Very concrete: non-native speakers had difficulty with the menu structure of our IVR. It is quite difficult to translate your own internal processes into an IVR structure that is understandable for all customers – without jargon that is almost impossible.”

IVR: negative factor for customer satisfaction

The result: almost half of the calls received by the employer specialists were not intended for them – which led to 46% being transferred, explains Verlaan. “While we strive to get people to the right employees as easily as possible. The IVR is therefore a negative outlier in the customer satisfaction survey.”

VDAB has stated in its vision that it strives for excellent services. Verlaan explains: “For example, we strive for the highest possible percentage of first call resolution. The employees are highly and broadly trained. We have a back office, but it is quite exceptional if a customer has to deal with that.”

Renewal of the contact center applications

VDAB also faced other challenges: for example, there was a need for a better customer view and the contact center solution was due for renewal. In 2017, VDAB has a European tender placed on the market, part of the renewal plan to eliminate a number of bottlenecks. That plan was based, among other things, on renewal of the contact center platform that had to be suitable for skills-based routing, IVR, telephony, e-mail, fax, traffic management and reporting, among other things. In addition to a new platform, the tender also includes separate lots for a speech solution (as an alternative to the IVR) and solutions in the field of chat and co-browsing, social media/webcare, WFM and recording.

Verlaan says that VDAB had already been put on the trail of speech technology through a workshop in which, among others, the Dutch company Telecats gave a demo. “Telecats already stood out for their practical solution for voice routing, for which they have shown several successful applications. They also gave a good indication of what is and what is not possible – with demos everything is often promised, while in the end the implementation is disappointing.”

Develop Flemish language model

After a tough tender procedure – with almost 500 requirements and award criteria – two parties remained at the beginning of 2019, of which Telecats won the 'voice lot' and another party (NTT) won the other solutions. Initially, a lot of energy was put into, among other things, the security aspects of the integration between Telecats and Genesys. But the language model also had to be tailor-made – because the Dutch language has other typical properties in Flanders.

The Speech Lab team at Telecats works specifically to innovate and improve our speech solutions by optimizing the acoustic, language and classification models in different languages. What have we done as a speech lab to tune the Dutch language model for Flemish?

In particular, we added Flemish words and speaking style by manually transcribing recordings with spoken questions from the callers. We see, for example, that more forms of politeness are used in Flemish. In addition, we have drawn up and added a list of Flemish personal names so that when callers started with their name, the speech recognizer did not confuse it with other words and we can anonymize the data, the name is then replaced by a tag .

Verlaan: “When implementing speech routing, you start – also in our Flemish language area – with a standard Dutch language package. For three months in the autumn of 2020, we routed ten percent of incoming telephone traffic to the speech recognition software, after which the calls ended up with VDAB employees. These are calls for which no IVR choice has been made by the customer to determine the customer demand. Callers had to enter whether they called as an employer or as a job seeker/employee. It was striking that the speech recognizer already scored very high on correct recognition of the question at the first use. And at least as special was that we received no further comments from customers about this new technology.”

Application trained in three months

“After three months, we found that the system had been sufficiently trained. Voice routing went live in April 2021, where we also removed the first IVR choice. The system must now independently determine whether the question comes from an employer or a jobseeker. In case of doubt, the software can ask an extra verification question about this. If the system can't recognize the question, we route the call to the most fully trained employee by default. Most employees are trained all-round, but we use skills-based routing so that we can train employees in a modular way and make use of priorities and queue announcements.”

High level of acceptance

An IVR is more often a burden than a joy for many. But formulating a short and concise answer to the question 'what are you calling about' is also a challenge for some. Verlaan: “Most of our customers call for their own file. In those cases, a name or a national register number is sufficient to route the customer to the right employee.”

VDAB has therefore not worried much about acceptance, explains Verlaan. “Our attitude was: we are going to try it, because we are convinced that speech is part of the future. Of course, correct recognition of the question is an important condition for acceptance. As a success criterion for the project, we have determined in advance that 90% should be recognized – a limit that Telecats itself also applies. If the customer systematically got stuck in speech recognition, we would abandon the project. We have therefore retained the existing IVR.”

Significantly fewer connections

Although it became clear during the pilot phase that the technology was well received by customers, the next customer satisfaction survey has yet to prove it. However, it is already clear that the number of dropouts – usual within an IVR – has fallen slightly. Within three weeks of the start, it also turned out that the number of internal transfers had decreased by about 20%. “That's all the time when the customer is waiting to get to the right employee,” says Verlaan. “More often than before, the customer immediately goes to the right employee. It is also talk time – the call costs for the 0800 number are for the account of VDAB. In addition, the employees are also enthusiastic. They see the spoken question on their screen, so that they can quickly address the subject during the conversation. As far as I'm concerned, you can speak of success if the technology does what it should and the customer finds the right employee without any problems.”

Invest in self-service

“Another objective of VDAB was to show that as a government body we innovate with new technology. We have not set very hard objectives specifically for this project – we mainly want to help the customer well. We do have ideas about possible logical next steps. For example, we want to be able to route calls intended for the helpdesk – which handles technical problems and questions for all target groups – directly. Now there is an intermediate step through our customer service. And we also want to expand the 24×7 self-service. Think of a password reset after a check of the personal data or providing information about the opening hours of local VDAB branches.”

And finally, the collaboration with Telecats has also gone well, emphasizes Verlaan. Open and transparent communication is essential for VDAB in order to build trust. This relationship is particularly important because Flemish organizations often rely on the Dutch market, says Verlaan. “Not only is the Dutch-speaking market in Flanders for this type of technology considerably smaller than the Dutch market, the Netherlands also seems somewhat smaller in terms of speech technology. more progressive than Flanders.”

The Flemish Service for Employment and Vocational Training is a Flemish government service that helps citizens to develop their careers and assists employers in filling their vacancies. VDAB does this with correct information and data, and together with partners, to provide a high-quality and innovative range of guidance, training and workplace learning, aimed at sustainable employment. VDAB works closely with employers; for them, VDAB matches candidates to their vacancies based on insights into the specific needs of the various sectors on the labor market.

(Ziptone/Erik Bouwer)

Case, Featured, Technology concentric, Concentrix Catalyst, Telecats