Speech Technology Keeps Moving Forward
One of the themes at last month's SpeechTek conference in Manhattan was that, economic downturn or not, the technology keeps making advances -- and, more importantly, companies in the field keep making money.
"We're in a position where companies still need to invest in the advancements being made," Michael Zirngibl, president and CEO of Angel.com, told me. "The industry at large is at a point where it's got all this customer data in hand; now we need to start using it."
Angel itself was touting its latest virtual call center solution, VCC ’08, which combines automated call distribution and IVR tools into a single, hosted application that allows companies to quickly and effectively address caller needs.
Other notable products on display included Genesys' Voice Platform 8, software that aligns self- and assisted service, and integrates voice across all customer service environments through open standards; Verint's Complete Semantic Index with advanced emotion detection and Smart Category Wizard, which transcribes and indexes every word in every call, comes up with automatic cluster that is updated hourly and can tell a manager at a glance if there’s a recurring or persistent issue; and Nuance's Intelligent Offer Management mobile device application, which delivers tailored marketing messages and product offers via the customer care channel by tapping into existing information within billing and CRM systems on customer demographics, as well as individual usage and purchase patterns.
In the midst of all the demos and statistics, one particular set of data jumped out at me. Bonnie Crater, SVP of marketing at VoiceObjects, noted that her company's survey of 84 mobile operators in 30 European countries, each operator with at least one million customers, found that 93 percent use voice self-service, with the remaining 7 percent planning to purchase such a system within 12 months.
Not everything in this area is new, however; Crater noted that bill payment (93 percent) and tech support (79 percent) are the top two inquiries the mobile operators receive.
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