Verizon Business used SpeechTEK as a venue to reacquaint the world with its formidable, hosted, speech-enabled IVR (interactive voice response) resources. Its news, this year, is the closer mating of voice self-service with its IP-based telephony network under the trade name “IP Enabled Speech Servivces”.

In practical terms, the new offering means that Verizon’s salespeople, engineers and integrators can say “Yes we can!” when customers ask whether they can support their move to IP-telephony networks. As Tom Smith, Verizon Business’ senior manager of IPCC/Speech, Global Advanced Voice Services, this is an evolutionary step for Verizon Business. It has long handled high call volumes on its voice self-service resources, involving both TDM (switched) traffic and VoIP. The story at SpeechTEK is that Verizon is stepping up to meet its customers’ demands for solutions that broaden the reach of the VoIP infrastructure as existing equipment reaches end-of-life or new end-user demands require.

Moving speech into Verizon’s IP Cloud is a competitive necessity, and it brings great value to Verizon’s customers by giving them multiple deployment options (on premises, hosted, or managed) and by obviating the need and expense associated transaction-driven advanced call handling features, like Takeback and Transfer. To back up the offering, Verizon employs more than 140 contact center services professionals. The portfolio of support services include: business process consulting, application development , customer lifecycle service and support, applications design and implementation, application upgrades and on-site assistance.

It’s the same quality of service that Verizon Business customers have come to expect, but now it extends across network borders to incorporate both TDM and IP.

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