Not so long ago, some industry figures were predicting the death of traditional call centre technology (which commonly uses interactive voice response (IVR)) due to the acceptance of the world-wide web.
Technology growth has meant that organisations need to adopt the full range of multi-media contact methods to become a true contact, rather than a call, centre. E-mail, text chat, interactive TV (iTV) and a host of emerging technologies give customers more chances to engage in dialogue with any company, in a matter of seconds. Rather than concurring with the death of IVR, Syntellect believes in its benefits, albeit within the need for an enterprise voice portal and further, the extension to a new level of IMR interactive media response.
A voice portal is a website that has been equipped with speech recognition and typically text-to-speech capability. As customers become familiar with using natural language voice commands to access data, they begin to demand capability across more and more applications. In most cases, customers are completely satisfied by placing a call into a voice portal, retrieving the desired information, then hanging up. Enterprise voice portal users will expect much more. They will expect to access one database to retrieve information, and then use that data to request another type of interaction.
IMR takes the thinking behind an enterprise voice portal a stage further. IMR is a current and evolving set of interactive, data access and communication technologies that represent the functionality necessary to support current and evolving enterprise voice portal requirements.
IMR is about the whole enterprise, not just the call centre. Syntellect believes that IMR can be immensely powerful in enhancing differentiated customer support, but also believe that these facilities should be extended to all those who interact with the organisation including customers, prospects, investors, employees and suppliers. This 360-degree approach is the key to creating loyalty within the aforementioned groups.
For example, a customer with a WAP-enabled wireless phone calls the portal for room reservations, speaks the city and date information, then reads a list of hotels and rates from the phone's display. The customer then selects a hotel from a screen and hears a prerecorded description of the amenities, then chooses to be transferred to a reservations agent. The reservations agent then downloads a Web page with the reservation details to the customer's phone. The page might include a link, which when selected later, calls a self-service voice application that provides driving directions to the hotel via voice or WAP. u
ENQUIRY No 68
Syntellect is based in Maidenhead, Berkshire, UK. www.syntellect.com
