In a move that reflects overall momentum of enterprise information infrastructure into “The Cloud”, USAirways has launched a new speech-enabled IVR and call steering resources to Nuance On Demand. Its decision embodies many of the indicated best practices that Opus Research will be exposing in the forthcoming report on “Voice in the Cloud” which documents new opportunities (as well as competitors) for long-standing hosted speech service providers.

Fueled by maturing standards for Web services and a plethora of APIs and development tools to accelerate “mash-ups,” the move of enterprise computing, communications and storage infrastructure is only accelerating. In USAirway’s case, the move to the Nuance on Demand (NoD) cloud sped up deployment, helped avoid capital spending and moved much of the administrative expense to a third party. At the same time, it replaced a multiplicity of diverse platforms with a single solution.

According to a press statement, economic justification came, in part, from shortening call durations and increased mechanization rates for repeated calls. Yet it was all done as part of an effort to “homeshore” many of the contact center rep jobs that had found their way into other labor markets.

Natural Language Understanding played an important role in USAirway’s purchase decision. The IVR will speak in the voice of “Wally,” much as Amtrak has employed “Julie” and BellCanada invoked “Emily” to answer calls, elicit customer response and route callers to the correct resource (be it an “self-service” IVR or customer service rep. The speech enabled IVR and call steering app resides in the cloud, but it is closely integrated with the network that delivers calls to USAirway’s 1,800 reservation agents, part of the airline’s 6,000 unionized customer care and reservation agents.

Instantiating these conversational applications “in the cloud,” is a natural. As with old-guard CallPromptr service (from AT&T) or EVS (from then MCI, now Verizon Business) calls arrive at an IVR which can ascertain the caller’s identity from ANI (automatic number identification) and gauge as much of the context as possible in order to offer highly personalized service. It is akin to what the merged United Airlines (with Continental) will be implementing for its self-service line, relying on Voxify-developed applications running on Microsoft’s Tellme platform.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Nuance, Contact Center, hosted speech, Natural Language