Join Dan Miller, Senior Analyst with Opus Research, for:
“Managed Service: Speech Self-Service without Risk”
Thursday, January 29, 2009 – 1 p.m. ET / 10 a.m. PT
Webcast sponsored by Voxify

In challenging financial times, customer care professionals have more incentive than ever to look to third parties to support phone-based self-service and assisted services. The reasons remain remarkably consistent through good times and bad. Quite simply, companies want to control costs without sacrificing the quality of care they extend to their clients, customers or prospects.

The result has been a boon for the third-party service providers that conform to the tenets of Telco 2.0. By definition, all can be considered “outsourcers” in that provide the resources, tools and personnel to manage some or all of a company’s contact center or IT operations. But unlike prior years, this is not an all-or-nothing proposition. New architectures for customer care have made it possible for customer care executives to be very granular as they decide how much (or how little) of customer care resources they want to turn over to third-parties.

Choices, Choices and More Choices
The move to new, service oriented architectures has made the transition possible. The VoiceXML browser/interpreter – which is the network element that takes spoken or DTMF input from customers and responds with spoken words has been separated from the application server that not only runs what we think of as interactive voice response (IVR) scripts, but also processes the business rules and conducts the database processing that are the foundation of timely, high-quality responses to customer requests.

Likewise, the customer data – such as customer files, transaction histories and traditional CRM content – is housed in separate resources which, for compliance reasons, often reside within each enterprise’s “firewall.” Whether you’re looking for something called hosted services, managed service, software-as-a-service or customer care on demand, you’ll find that the most desirable third-party service providers are the ones that exhibit the highest levels of flexibility by taking advantage of the separation of the browser/IVR resources from application logic and data.

Peace of Mind is the Real Benefit
I will be discussing the benefits of these overall trends next Thursday, January 29th in a webcast sponsored by customer care automation specialist, Voxify. A key takeaway will be that, while the introduction of so many deployment options is complicated, it enhances the value of taking a managed service approach. Indeed, one of the most dramatic findings from our latest research is that deployment architectures (including the location of voice processing, applications processing and data processing resources) are totally separate from management strategies.

Enterprises of all sizes are in the driver’s seat in terms of deciding how much of their customer care operations they want to self-manage versus how much they would put under the control of a managed service provider. In recent reports, Opus Research observed that third-party service providers can be faster to bring up new applications and, likewise, they have more robust abilities to keep the application “fresh,” thanks to constant monitoring and refinement based on changing usage, traffic patterns and business conditions.

Please register to join me and Eric Wasserman, Director of Platform Engineering at Voxify, for an engaging and informative discussion of these issues.

Dan Miller
e | [email protected]
p | 415-904-7666

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