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For more information on becoming an Opus Research client, please contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net).

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The acquisition underscores the importance of Recombinant Communications as a growth strategy for West Corporation in developing both hosted and on-premise IVR deployment options and managing complex installations with the additive platform offered by Holly. As it stands now, West Corporation was already one of Holly’s largest installations in North America so the merging of the voice platforms should be relatively seamless.

We’ll follow with more information about the acquisition.

Speech Recognition – Getting It Right

Webcast on-demand

Effective change management and staff engagement in a risk averse environment. How the Australian Department of Defence introduced an open menu voice recognition system which didn’t upset the customer whilst dramatically reducing queue times and reducing average handle time by 15%.

Speakers:

• Dan Miller – Senior Analyst, Opus Research
• Luke Johnston – Business Integration Coordinator, Australian Defence Service Centre

Tuesday, June 1, 2010 — 1 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m. PDT
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The proliferation of smartphones, e-commerce Web sites and social networks has cultivated a new generation of highly connected “anywhere customers” who are taking command of “how, when and why” they are interacting with their selected vendors and service providers.

In this webcast, Dan Miller with Opus Research and Zor Gorelov, CEO with SpeechCycle, will showcase:

• Changing patterns in self-service and assisted service as customers take command
• Strategies for customer care architectures that leverage internal resources and provide consistently good experiences
• Best practices for enriching the customer experience across multiple media and modalities
• New forms of customer dialogs that blend automated speech, visual components, live agents and text as appropriate.

Attendees of the webcast will receive a free white paper (“Reaching the Anywhere Customer”) published by Opus Research detailing the new roles for contact centers in customer interactions.

Speech Recognition – Getting It Right

Wednesday, April 28, 2010 — 4 p.m. PDT
Sign Up Below!

Effective change management and staff engagement in a risk averse environment. How the Australian Department of Defence introduced an open menu voice recognition system which didn’t upset the customer whilst dramatically reducing queue times and reducing average handle time by 15%.

Speakers:

• Dan Miller – Senior Analyst, Opus Research
• Luke Johnston – Business Integration Coordinator, Australian Defence Service Centre

Featured Research Reports are available to registered users only.

For more information on becoming an Opus Research client, please contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net).

Click Here to View the Report Summary

Update: There will be a public auction with an undisclosed number of bidders next Friday (9/11 for those who might be superstitious).

But seriously folks, it feels like a lot has happened out in the field since July 20. We get the sense that Avaya’s sales force has spent considerable time in front of Nortel’s existing customers and channel partners explaining how a transition to Avaya will work. Pre-announcing victory in the bid was a stroke of marketing and sales support genius. Meanwhile, industry strategists have known for some time that Gores had charted a course for Siemens growth in the enterprise market that is predicated on leveraging its OpenScape Software and related UC Integrations into the Nortel installed base.

For many years, Siemens’ OpenScape has been ahead Unified Communications (UC) pack with its support of almost every vendor’s UC clients. Yet its efforts languished because the enterprise division was known to be “on the block”. or “up for sale” – which is never good when you’re selling enterprise infrastructure with an expected service life measured in decades. When Gores Group entered the picture, analysts saw some time tested method in the madness. Gores would use his proven technique of assembling related communications enterprises into a going concern. Hey! This is “Corporate Recombinant Telephony”.

Glomming Nortel’s enterprise assets and installed base onto Siemens operations using OpenScape as the glue and HiPath as the path forward is the foundation of the Gores Group’s vision. The problems that cloud this vision are two-fold. First, the world economy is only beginning to come out of its deep freeze and enterprise spending on call processing and voice processing systems overall have taken a hit. Second, Avaya’s preemptive strike at Nortel’s existing customers is bound to have some impact on the purchase decision.

This particular integration, which uses OpenMethod’s adapter to connect RightNow and Genesys enables companies to support intelligent routing and deliver those calls to an agent desktop that includes a softphone for the voice channel along with relevant metadata, including purpose of call, open issues, transaction history, location and other contextual information. What’s more, the agent desktops display interactions across a multitude of communications channels, including Web-based, email and chat.

From risk-reduction point of view, this particular solution carriers the “GValidated” imprimatur, which indicates that Genesys Labs has put the solution through an extensive testing and certification process. In Genesys’ words, “Only applications that carry the Gvalidated logo can claim that the integration has been developed according to Genesys-approved methods and standards, designed using Genesys tools, documented through Genesys standards and methodology, and successfully tested in a lab environment.” The era of Recombinant Telephony is one in which solutions are increasingly constructed from code that is derived from a number of sources. This sort of certification gives air cover to IT department and a comfort level that it will work under the anticipated conditions, which is especially important for customer-facing tasks.

Other global trends are undeniable. With downward pressure on both capital spending and staffing, providers of solutions that include hosted, on-demand or “in the cloud” alternatives have reason for optimism. We were briefed on the new services and features offered by a broad range of service providers, including incumbent telephone companies (Verizon Business), and the broad range of platform providers ranging from the the full-blown version upgrades from Voxeo (showcasing Prophecy 10) and Convergys (introducing “Intelligent Self-Service”) and VoltDelta’s wholesale refresh of its automated contact center solutions.

Evidence of heightened interest in all things mobile was everywhere. This included more enlightened discussions of the ultimate voice user interface for mobile devices, voice search and multimodal/outbound notifications. I was also very encouraged by the level of interest shown in voice biometric-based caller authentication. We’ve clearly crossed a threshold whereby the opening questions are concerned with implementation options and overcoming recorded “spoof” efforts, rather than last-year’s customary “Does it really work?”

Voxeo has trademarked the term “The Unlocked Communications Platform” in reference to the new Prophecy 10 software. In doing so, it may have captured the overall spirit of the speech community. The year-and-a-half-long economic downturn has made us all yearn to be free and has generally sped up the process that enterprise planners go through to identify and define which technologies and personnel to jettison and which to keep and leverage. “Mobility, Security and Openness” are the “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” of the new regime. Add the human element and a focus on the best user experience and you’ve identified where the pockets of opportunity are going to be.

Leveraging the capabilities of a platform that includes Nortel’s installed base of enhanced directory assistance query processing and agent platforms (acquired in 2004), plus similar platforms developed by Varetis Solutions GMBH (acquired in 2006) and the listings aggregation capabilities of LSSIData (obtained in 2007), the company has the foundation for unassailable leadership in enhanced directory assistance, handling over 3.4 billion queries each year. But DA is, admittedly a slow growth or no-growth domain as Web-based search engines add location-based queries that include addresses, phone numbers and other relevant data.

Enhanced DA is just a teaser demo for the variety of services that the VoltDelta OnDemand can offer hosted services customers. It is a full-blown platform for virtual contact centers that includes speech-enabled interactive voice response (IVR), enhanced call routing and back end data processing that rivals anything else we’ve seen in the marketplace. Yet, thus far, the company has maintained a very low profile, relegating itself to the “highly reliable” or “telco quality” platform offering that puts it on a par with Microsoft’s Tellme or Nuance On Demand, with less of a commitment to standards than Voxeo.

VoltDelta builds differentiation on its ready-made incorporation of live agents into the call flow and workflow. As a leading provider of Directory Assistance, it has built significant credibility surrounding the handling of call volumes and enhanced IVR. Now its challenge is to expand its offer into selected verticals, including more telecommunications, financial services, healthcare and government offered services like the ubiquitous 511-based access to local information.