Acknowledging the importance of testing before a speech-enabled customer care system “goes live,” Nuance Communications and Empirix Inc. have expanded their global partnership. Because Empirix offers its proactive load testing as a service, Nuance can offer its customers and prospects the ability to put new speech applications through rigorous testing prior to deployment. Even though speech-enabled applications are often only part of a company’s multichannel customer care offering, this type of testing has taken on increased importance because callers expect rapid, accurate response to their issues, regardless of the channel they employ.

As we noted here, Nuance has been dedicated to simplifying and streamlining the implementation of applications that provide a “natural language” interface for users. Pre-testing can prove to be an important component to such engagements because they will enable the company to detect where latencies or system delays may occur and correct them before they become a source of customer frustration.

Empirix began offering its testing-as-a-service in mid-2009. It formed a similar partnership with Avaya and its go-to-market partners in October 2010. Opus Research sees this sort of testing and ongoing monitoring as vital for promoting the highest-quality user experience across a broad spectrum of self-service and “assisted self-service” (meaning those that involve live agents) interactions.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Speech recognition, Nuance, self-service, Empirix, Natural Language