Varolii, a 13 year-old company that is the product of a merger between Par3 communications and EnvoyWorldWide), has added to its portfolio of inbound services through a . Varolii already claims to have over 450 business customers for a core of “customer interaction management” services that largely revolve around multimodal alerts, or outbound messaging services targeting large numbers of customers and employees through voice, text messages, smartphone applications and/or email.

Because a large percentage of alerts (such as reminders to pay, prescription renewals, flight cancellation reminders and the like) require immediate response from recipients, the addition of enhanced inbound services is a natural extension of services. The result of the partnership is , positioned as the combination of Varolii’s “proactive outbound” services with Spoken’s “guided inbound” features. This marks a return to form for Spoken, which started out in 2005 with the idea of using live “super agents” to monitor incoming calls to speech-enabled IVR systems and intervene when the speech platform (or live agent) was misinterpreting what a caller had to say.

Seeking growth, Spoken acquired a company called GotVoice in 2009 to enter the realm of human-aided voicemail transcription (a la SpinVox). By contrast, the partnership with Varolii will leverage Spoken’s full suite of inbound contact center functionality, which includes call switching, recording, monitoring and analytics, in addition to its patented, human-aided, speech recognition IVR, which it calls Conversational Interactive Voice Response (IVR).

Pricing for Varolii 360 services varies and is not public.

Categories: Articles

Tags: CRM, outbound alerts, conversational commerce, customer experience, Varolii, Spoken