The market for voice biometrics-based solutions has matured significantly in the past year. In this document Opus Research compares the products and strategic position of a select group of solution providers and presents structured analysis that should benefit decision makers planning to introduce speaker verification in their contact centers or on mobile devices or networks.
In May 2012 Opus Research, in conjunction with Nuance Communications, commissioned Coleman-Parkes Associates to survey 1,000 individuals who had recently used their telephone for customer care. They described the shortcomings of present systems for caller authentication and provided clues that should be used in designing secure and convenient customer care in the future.
People will go to great lengths to avoid interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Yet progressive, customer-pleasing companies like Hyatt Hotels are putting conversational IVR systems into place to the benefit of both their guests and their contact center agents. Therefore, in an age when some have said “The IVR is Dead,” we see “Conversational IVR” playing the role of Virtual Assistant in the enterprise, fostering a better customer experience and higher morale among customer service representatives.
Mobile subscribers are using their smartphones and other mobile devices to take control of their interactions with the firms with whom they choose to do business. They’ve forced companies to form mobile strategies that must go far beyond simply offering a “mobile app” and range to providing the most effective, and natural, mobile user experience. Companies and their technology providers have responded in kind.
As technology providers and system integrators around the world successfully bring their solutions to market, we’re identifying the product attributes, architectures and deployment strategies that define the best practices in layered, multi-factor and risk-based deployments of voice biometrics.
A remarkably high percentage number of C-level executives indicate their companies’ lack of a defined strategy to deal with all the “personal data” provided by customers and prospects through a multitude of channels. Yet they also tell us of their plans to incorporate that data into “understanding intent” and forging better communications links that promote loyalty, profitability and product refinement.
Siri is being covered in most of the business and popular press as a “mobile assistant.” But its long-term impact is tightly bound to how end-users discover, define, and get comfortable of new ways to control devices, navigate content and carry out daily activities through mobile devices.
Thanks to advances in reliability, capacity and security, “The Cloud” has become the general destination for applications, storage and computer power that used to live almost exclusively within enterprise firewalls. This creates a new playing field where old-guard, voice application service providers (like Voxeo, Convergys, Microsoft/Tellme, Nuance) are on a par with Amazon.com, Salesforce.com, IBM and other “giants” of cloud computing.
Featured Research Shoppers and browsers turn to the Web, search engines and social networks for advice and information about goods and services; but the phone (especially mobile) and contact center resources still figure prominently into their conversational path. Leading contact… Read More ›
With over 6.5 million registered voice prints supporting user authentication, we can begin to detect patterns that are defining successful adoption of the technology. It is clear that voice biometrics must be incorporated in multi-factor deployment schemes and that demand is destined to be driven by creating a positive user experience across multiple communications modalities and networks. That creates a “multiplier effect” as system integrators, application developers and mobile service providers discover the value of stronger authentication of individual end-users.