BT

Deafness is a problem that affects many people who may never know they have a problem. In the UK there are thought to be 5 million people who are hard of hearing, but only one million have actually realised that they are hard of hearing. This sheer number of people affected presents a massive challenge for the Royal National Institute for the Deaf (RNID), Britain’s biggest charity working for people affected by deafness. The RNID was keen to find a confidential way to help each individual person discover whether they have a hearing difficulty and if so, to help them to find the services that can help.

The idea of using a telephone help-line to diagnose deafness had been tested successfully in the Netherlands. This trial had used IVR, a computer system that answers a telephone instead of a live operator, with excellent results. This trial and a Beta Test conducted at the University of Southampton convinced the RNID that it was feasible to use IVR to offer an instant telephone hearing check for very large numbers of people.

An IVR based solution was a good choice for RNID, because the number of callers to the service could not be guessed in advance and IVR solutions can be scaled up very easily to meet rising demand. In fact, it was probably the only cost-effective way for a charity to provide such a service to 5 million potential callers.

Accordingly the RNID began talks with BT to build an audio service that would be able to reach out to millions of people in the UK. The lines were to be provided by BT at special rates and system supplier C3 was involved from the start to provide the IVR answering facilities. C3’s Apcentia call-handling system provided the core functionality required and C3 customised this to suit the RNID’s special requirements.

C3 had already installed a large number of IVR sites and has sites in 26 different countries. Their system, Apcentia goes a long way beyond the simple answering and routing applications that we encounter every day in call centres, it can be used for much larger, more complicated applications. Apcentia has been used to build complex corporate information services such as news, weather and so on and entertainment services such as quizzes and games, where a caller is guided through a series of questions and makes a series of individual choices. It is very easy to programme such applications with Apcentia, and the system keeps comprehensive statistics on callers’ responses and gives detailed results of the callers responding to every campaign or information service.

The RNID used C3 technology to create a telephone questionnaire where the caller is asked to listen to groups of numbers and repeat them back. The entire service operates over ordinary telephone lines. The questionnaire takes about five minutes to complete and as the questions progress, there are different degrees of background noise that make it harder to discern the numbers correctly. Together, BT, C3 and the RNID carefully constructed the series of questions so that they could identify those callers who were experiencing difficulties hearing the numbers correctly.

Anybody can try this questionnaire, simply by calling the local rate number: 0845 600 5555.

The service was launched by the Countess of Wessex on Christmas Day 2005, supported by an advertising campaign on TV. After three months of operation, 218,000 callers had already tried the hearing check between Christmas and the 1st of February 2006, so they are well on the way to meeting their target of a million calls in Year One. Using this service, people have been able to take the first step towards dealing with deafness, in the privacy of their own homes, without creating extra work for the NHS and their GPs.