There’s a longer story to come, but we were treated to a briefing from VoltDelta OnDemand Solutions that shows that the company (or its parent Volt Information Sciences) has done a super job of assimilating a succession of acquisitions over the last few years. After a couple of years of touting its “telco grade” hosting services, new marketing and sales management personnel have assembled its capabilities into a coherent set of solutions that closely adhere to Opus Research’s vision of Recombinant Telephony services.

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.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Speech recognition, Voice Self Service, Recombinant Telephony, VoltDelta