For marketing or customer care executives contemplating the use of third-parties for telephone-based services, the questions no longer involve “who, what, when and where?” but “how and how much?” The outsourced market for so-called “teleservices” now exceeds $21 billion globally. Only $900 million of that was spent on hosted speech-enabled applications. The rest, of course, required the involvement of live agents in contact centers around the world.

There is no longer a “bright line” of demarcation between the services that use call automation and speech automation and those that do not. Yet there are hardly any major firms in travel and hospitality, financial services, healthcare, telecom, retailing, government or you-name-it that do not incorporate some form of automated voice prompts and automated call distribution at the front-end of the phone-based conversations they hold with customers, employees or other stake-holders.

The Ritz Carlton Hotel chain, for instance, is an exception to the rule. It has a live agent answer all inbound telephone calls to its reservation lines within two rings. This is usually an indication that the company is willing to over-invest in contact center resources and over provision its network resources in the name of maintaining its nuance (so to speak) with its clientele. It helps when room rates routinely exceed 10 times the posted offers of the chain that “leaves-the-light-on-for-ya.”

This is a Job for VOX 2005
On August 1, 2005, Opus Research will host a conference called “VOX 2005: Sourcing Speech Services.” It will lead off with a panel entitled “The Revolution will be Virtualized” in which executives from Visa International and Domino’s Pizza (Australia) join their hosted services providers to discuss the processes involved with outsourcing all or part of mission critical applications. Visa turned to a relative upstart, Mir3, which specializes in emergency notifications and intelligent communications. Domino’s expanded a long-standing relationship with Telstra, an incumbent carrier which, like many of its fixed line counterparts, has a formidable roster of speech processing and call processing services to bring to bear for its enterprise clients.

Fueling a Creative Fire
A grass-roots movement like hosting needs only a little bit of accelerant to catch fire. In a session called “Are Rich VoIP Services Gonna Make me Rich?” visionary executives from a rich mix of infrastructure providers, including Intel, Cisco, Pactolus, Eicon and Digium, will describe the flurry of creative development taking place overtop broadband Internet links. We’re especially fortunate to have Mark Spencer, the person that originated Asterisk (an open source, IP-PBX) and manages the community of volunteer developers who are building a rich mix of enhanced services for both carriers and enterprises, there to share his experiences and observations.

Showcases for Innovation
Directory Assistance service providers are underappreciated in terms of their role to showcase some of the most dazzling implementations of CAT. In a panel called “DA’s Day in the Sun” executives from Tellme, Local Matters, InfoNXX and ScanSoft describe how the marvels of modern conversational access marry a back-end that is starting to resemble the most personal of personalized portals to help mobile callers locate and navigate their way to nearby businesses. DA’s secret weapon is a $13 billion topline fed by a time-tested, transactional model for generating new revenues.

You Will Reap What You SOA
As noted above, spending by large businesses around the world are defining the pace and dynamics of CAT deployment. Thanks to efforts by IBM, Avaya, Microsoft, HP and go-to-market partners like Audium, new technologies leverage past investment in self-service Web sites by adhering to a Service Oriented Architecture. SOAs are built on Web standards and defacto standards like XML, HTML, Java and SOAP. Applications that adhere to the SOA are well-suited for implementation as hosted services because the application environments and application programming interfaces (APIs) are standard and well understood.

We’re looking forward to a session called “Distributing the Services Oriented Architecture” in which executives from the above mentioned companies will help us understand the ways that enterprises are investing in self-service systems. They do so in ways that transcend the confines of the everyday contact center, and they are providing callers with access to familiar and useful data and applications from the same catalogues, customer files and transaction histories that support their Web sites.

CAT’s Not just for Large Businesses Anymore
The leading providers of outsourcing services have long regarded the largest companies as their best customers. Big firms in financial services, travel and hospitality, entertainment, telecommunications and even government agencies run millions of minutes through their network resources. In return, they are entitled to the least expensive rates for minutes on the phone network.

But what about smaller companies? Microsoft entered the speech processing and real-time communications realm with visions of reaching thousands of medium-sized businesses through millions of developers and channel partners. Yet hosted or managed services make just as much or more sense to the small and medium-sized companies, who are often too cash strapped to purchase new equipment, yet are willing to pay a premium to service providers to give them the look, feel and sound of a prospering, company.

Finally, a Town Hall Meeting I Can Get Behind
VOX has always been a venue for world class corporate minds to outline the future of conversational access technologies. The conference series got its start in VOX 1999 and Sol Trujillo, then Chairman and Chief Executive officer of U S WEST, delivered the first keynote address and described a world where new personalized services built on top of high-speed wireless access, more elegant interfaces to real-time, interactive, personal communications services would provide new business opportunities for communications service providers.

Lots of things have changed in the six years since the first VOX. The U S WEST name has been supplanted by Qwest Communications. Sol Trujillo has emerged triumphantly as the new chairman of Telstra, the major diversified, incumbent carrier serving Australia. Most importantly, all of us are engaged in defining the products and services that communications service providers can bring to their marketplace and how well those services dovetail with the plans of progressive business enterprises and ambitious personal communications customers.

In the Town Hall meeting that wraps up VOX, I’ll be re-united with my long-time cohort (and originator of VOX) Mark Plakias and we’ll be joined by top executives from Holly Connects, Scansoft, Microsoft, Vocalocity and Cisco. Our assignment is to help define the factors that will motivate decisionmakers in the enterprise markets to get their firms “future ready” by investing in automated speech technologies and the SOA.

VOX 2005 will be held on Monday, August 1 from 10AM til 6PM with plenty of breaks for lunch and business networking. It’s worth it to come to the SpeechTek conference a day early to share insights with our panelists. The conversations on Conversational Access Technologies start at VOX.

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