There are two very important take-aways from Genesys’s acquisition of its long-time developer/partner, SpeechStorm. 1) You can teach an old dog new tricks; and 2) you, personally, won’t have to. If you visit the AppFoundry landing page and search for SpeechStorm you will find a list of five different resources that start with the “Speech Storm Personalized IVR,” described as:

A complete platform to design, configure, test, deploy and manage voice applications for Genesys Voice Portal (GVP) including over 60 self-service application templates for common – and not-so-common – customer services.

The next item in AppFoundry is the “SpeechStorm Visual IVR” a suite of applications, first announced in 2008, to complement traditional IVR self-service by serving up menus of options to browsers running on PCs, laptops, smartphones or tablets. Recognizing that individuals use multiple devices and channels before turning to agents, SpeechStorm Visual IVR provides a mechanism for customers to choose among relevant options and avoid repeating themselves as they pursue the next steps in their customer journeys.

Genesys sees the SpeechStorm development platform and the pre-configured apps as key enhancements to GVP (Genesys Voice Portal). In an era when mobile apps, e-commerce Web sites and Intelligent Assistants (both Mobile Personal Assistants and Enterprise Intelligent Assistants) seem to minimize the role of existing IVR systems, the little-appreciated fact is that an IVR platform is where calls initially land when individuals inevitably opt to initiate a voice call to an enterprise. The convenient truth is that any context that can be delivered with a call can shorten the time it takes to complete the caller’s task and create a more pleasant user experience.

The acquisition is a good move by Genesys. SpeechStorm has proven to be a great developer/partner over the years and its line of software is an excellent augmentation of existing GVP resources. As noted in the opening paragraph of this post, by providing templates for multiple apps that bring enhanced capabilities to the enterprise voice response reources, Genesys/SpeechStorm have significantly shortened the time it takes to launch new services, such as Visual IVR.  The open questions are whether and how SpeechStorm, as part of Genesys, is prepared to support existing enterprise customers where its software is integrated with competing IVR systems and call-processing infrastructure software.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence

Tags: Genesys, Interactive Voice Response, MobileCX, SpeechStorm