This chapter provides an introduction to the concept of business tasks represented by the Business Task object within VoiceObjects.

For information on how to configure the object and more details on how business tasks are processed, refer to Business Task in the Object Reference.

About Business Tasks

Business tasks define a business view on top of an actual dialog definition. They structure the dialog in terms of tasks the caller can accomplish while interacting with an application, such as authenticating through account number and PIN, getting information on an outstanding order, changing credit card details, transferring money, etc. Task-related data, i.e. application-specific information gathered while the task was processed and general statistics, such as whether a task was successfully completed, the time it was active, recognition rates, etc., will automatically be logged to Infostore, the logging component of VoiceObjects Server, without the need for developers to manually collect this information and store it in a custom database. By defining business tasks to structure your application, valuable information on the usage of the application as well as performance of the overall system is logged out-of-the-box by VoiceObjects Server.

Business tasks are represented by the Business Task object, and the start and end points are set by placing Expression objects with the STARTTASK and FINISHTASK function into the dialog flow. They are displayed with start  and stop  icons, both in the Dialog Designer and project documentation in PDF format. This helps to quickly identify business tasks in a dialog flow:

Logging and Reporting

Through VoiceObjects Analyzer or any other reporting framework based on Infostore, the data collected by Infostore enables customer relationship managers, business owners and decision makers to get a high-level overview on how successful callers are in interacting with the applications. This applies to applications in all four phone channels, i.e. voice, video, text and Web, with consolidated reports across all deployed channels.

Several predefined VoiceObjects Analyzer reports provide answers to questions like:

·         How many times did callers attempt to accomplish the task of placing an order?

·         How many callers successfully finished the task of transferring money in my phone banking application, and how many did not?

·         How many callers aborted the task of changing their bank account information while being in the middle of it?

·         How many times did a task fail due to back end problems?

·         How many times did a task fail because the caller returned to the main menu before finishing the task?

·         What was the average confidence value returned by the speech recognition engine during the Authentication task?

·         How many No Match events occurred during the Money Transfer task?

The following image shows a sample report on task completion rates in a self-service application:

 

 

Any kind of user-defined report can be created based on the data logged by Infostore. See Chapter 3 – The Physical Data Model in the Infostore Guide for further information on the table structure used for logging business tasks. See Chapter 3 – Report Library in the Analyzer Guide for a full list of available reports.