Shopping and “e-commerce” are both undergoing dramatic changes and the coming year will find companies of all sizes incorporating search optimization, social networking, mobile services and outbound communications into strategies to build customer loyalty, multimodal engagement and greater sales. But the move to the Web and mobile devices has not left the “voice channel” totally out of the picture. To the contrary, most companies are finding that many of their customers continue to find the phone (and the companies voice portal) the most efficient way to carry out common tasks.

That’s why it is no surprise that SpeechCycle, a firm that has pioneered robust, phone-based self-service application development, has hit a billion interaction milestone. The company is one of a handful of firms that have developed core technology and tools to enable companies to extend high-quality customer service over multiple channels. Its umbrella platform supports “Rich Speech Apps” and it was the topic of this Webcast in which I presented the findings of a survey we conducted to discover the preferences that customers and prospects indicate as they go about their daily efforts to find the companies they prefer to do business with and the products and service offerings that their friends recommend. Zor followed with a demonstration of the company’s SmartCare application, providing a way for communications companies to offer high-quality customer care at high levels of automation.

I’ll have a lot more to say about the future self-service and assisted self-service in a couple of days, after gaining insights from major retailers and enabling technology providers at Orange-SF. The key underpinnings of SpeechCycle’s revolve around its ability to support customer empowerment which, to my mind, is the foundation of true self-service.

Categories: Articles

Tags: mobile services, speech processing, customer care, self-service