It is no secret that the billion-dollar interactive voice response (IVR) business was built on cost savings strategies resulting from “call diversion” and “agent attrition.” Investment in voice response units (VRUs) was justified by savings resulting from reductions in force in the call center. The math was simple: A call handled “in the IVR” costs less than a dollar, while live agent handling costs in excess of $4.00.
Articles
CAT ScanXIII: How CAT Can Help Katrina Victims
As soon as President George W. Bush exhorted viewers of a nationally televised speech to call a hot line number (1-877-568-3317) for help reuniting relatives driven apart by Hurricane Katrina, the alarms started. Media-stimulated calling activity will crash the public telephone network just as surely as a Category III hurricane will breach an inadequately engineered flood wall.
CAT ScanXI: VOX 2005 — Your Source for Sourcing CAT
For marketing or customer care executives contemplating the use of third-parties for telephone-based services, the questions no longer involve “who, what, when and where?” but “how and how much?” The outsourced market for so-called “teleservices” now exceeds $21 billion globally. Only $900 million of that was spent on hosted speech-enabled applications. The rest, of course, required the involvement of live agents in contact centers around the world.
CAT ScanX: The Growing Case for Conversational Authentication
Mass theft of personal information is a near daily occurrence, sparking high-profile coverage on nightly news and in national news magazines. In one particularly noteworthy week, files disappeared from a leading public institute of higher education, a company specializing in secure transport of corporate files, one of the Big Three North American credit reporting companies and the leading aggregator of legal proceedings, public records and corporate reports.
CAT ScanIX: Whatever it is, It Ain’t Voice
The good news first: Enterprises of all sizes are ready to embrace Voice over IP (VoIP). The bad news? They don’t know what they are talking about.
CAT ScanVIII: The Toll-Free Angle on the AT&T Acquisition
Twelve months and $16 billion from now, SBC is scheduled to complete its acquisition of AT&T. During the intervening months analysts, journalists and regulators will take turns casting aspersions on the deal. From a financial point of view, it’s hard to see synergies emerging from SBC’s stepped up growth-through-acquisition strategy. As the ‘safe harbor’ saying goes, “past performance does not predict future results,†but several Wall Streeters have already observed that the erosion of AT&T’s top line more than offsets the meager growth that SBC has generated in the past few years.
CAT ScanVII: 2005: Yet Another Year of Intelligent Migration
Opus Research is a long-standing and unrepentant booster of speech-enablement. We stand for judicious use of advanced speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech conversion (TTS) and all the attendant hardware, software, professional services and tooling (soaking up something on the order of $28 billion in 2005) directed at a single goal. That is to take existing self-service infrastructure – on a Web site, in front of a corporate directory ‘autoattendant’, baked into a contact center or hosted environment – and “make it talk.â€
CAT ScanVI: CAT’s Future is in the Hands of IT Policy Makers [and they don’t even know it]
Several seemingly unrelated product introductions and refinements herald the next generation of Conversational Access Technologies (CAT). They also spell a challenge to enterprise IT personnel responsible for assimilating new technologies as systems become unmistakably more conversational. The message is “Be prepared.†In this case, it means an ounce of policy [regarding such things as the installation and use of IM-clients] is worth hours of technical support or even disaster recovery in the future.
CAT ScanV: Mergers Trigger Need for Network Identity Strategy
Cingular’s US $41 billion acquisition of AT&T Wireless is a done deal. Judging by the opinion of the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), which gave its go-ahead on Monday Oct 15, having two huge behemoths atop the wireless service provider stack is a good thing for competition. The Federal Communications Commission followed suit in approving the merger the following day. As a result of their rulings the new Cingular will have to divest itself of operations in 16 markets in eleven swing states, and will have to forego bidding in the next wireless spectrum auction.
CAT Scan Three: VoIP *is* Hype
From a CAT point of view, the services that carry the banner of “VoIP” to the market place, most conspicuously Vonage, Skype and AT&T CallVantage, are vying for expanded market share and ultimately revenues, while they help customers and prospective customers make a transition to converged network services.