Voxeo Talks

An informed and engaged customer is the best kind of customer. Are you proactively communicating with your customers?

Join Ovum, MicroAutomation and Voxeo for our upcoming webinar “Turning Customer Service Inside Out with Proactive Customer Engagement” on Wednesday, May 9th, 2012 at 1 PM Eastern. We will share proven best practices and examples of how businesses are using outbound communications, such as proactive customer service and notifications via IVR and text, to increase customer satisfaction, reduce costs and remain competitive.

Join us to learn:

• How to use industry metrics to assess the benefits of moving from reactive to proactive, with illustrative case studies
• Application of best practices in designing a successful outbound solution that balances both customer expectations and company business needs
• How to use outbound to effectively manage call volume and spikes
• The advantages and trade-offs to consider with the supporting platform and infrastructure decisions
• How to best identify high-value and high-priority applications for maximum short- and long-term measurable ROI

Click here to register today!

All attendees will receive a copy of Ovum’s new white paper: Best Practices in Proactive Outbound Customer Contact

Providing best-in-class IVR technology is a science, but deciding on the right messages and voice for your new IVR system is more of an art. After you’ve customized your IVR script with the right message, the next step you should take is to give your system a distinct voice that will resonate with your customers and set the tone for your message and your brand image.

To find the right voice for your message, you can develop a persona by considering your customers’ demographics and intent:

Demographics: You probably already have an extensive understanding of the demographics of your customer base. You’ll want to keep this broadly in mind – are your customers geographically distributed or does most of your business come from one country or region? Is there a particular age range or gender that defines most of your customer base? This can help you make decisions about language, dialect and age or gender of the IVR voice.

Intent: Depending on the function of your IVR, the appropriate tone of voice may be very different. An outbound IVR system that makes notifications of service outages would have a more serious and mature tone than an IVR that provided customer service functions for a retailer with a youthful audience, for example.

Once you understand this information, you are ready to put together a persona for your IVR, so that you can select the distinct voice that both reflects your brand, and will be appropriately received by your customers when they are interacting with the system. Customers will appreciate that your company has a voice they can identify with, allowing you to be sure that you are delivering your message and providing for their needs in the best way possible.

At Voxeo, we’ve partnered with GMVoices – the world’s largest producer of professionally-recorded voice prompts for automated technologies – to provide male and female voices in over 100 languages and dialects from which an on-brand, professionally produced dialog can be recorded and integrated into your IVR.

Hear a demo of a conversation with an IVR agent for an insurance company, with a voice chosen to be friendly, helpful and reassuring:

Visit our website to get more info on IVR prompt recording and more information on optimizing your Voxeo IVR with high-quality custom voice prompts from GMVoices.

If you’re tired of rummaging in your pockets, cup holders, and under your car seats for change when you have to utilize metered parking, you’re not alone. New Parking was founded with one mission in mind: create the easiest, most error-free cashless way to pay for metered parking. Six years after starting operations in 2006, the company has done just that and is steadily growing year after year. We recently spoke with co-founder, President and CEO Thomas Janacek to get a feel for how New Parking got started and how Voxeo’s technology empowered them to build a system other IVR vendors found daunting.

Overview:

New Parking was founded to offer a solution to a common problem – the inconvenience of paying for parking via coin-based meters. We were based in Silicon Valley at the time, and a friend (who happened to have a background in telecom and SMS predictive text technology) went on a short trip into Oakland to pick up some bread. In the process, he got a parking ticket. We realized there was a need for a quick, easy and cashless way to pay for metered parking. With cellphones becoming more ubiquitous at the time, paying by phone seemed like a practical solution.

How are you specifically solving this problem?

We made the system simple, with as little time and user input required as possible. In cities where our technology is installed, once someone calls our system, all they have to do is indicate their parking meter ID number and they are registered as paid, and also given information on whether the meter has any maximum time limits. Meter readers can easily tell which meters are paid via New Parking. For first-time users of the system, we provide a free first hour of parking – our system sends them a text message so they can easily register on our system by calling back or going to our website. We have about 5-10% new users and a high conversion rate to regular users, due to the system’s ease of use and simple conversion process.

Why did you build with Voxeo?

We built the voice layer of the system with Voxeo technology because of the quality of the platform, and the speed of development. The IVR application we designed has a high level of complexity in terms of the interactions required with the voice layer.  Of the five companies we approached, Voxeo was the only one that ‘got it’. Larger telecom vendors had demanded a retainer to even spec out a workable version of the application. Using Voxeo, we were able to build the app in three weeks – for approximately the same cost that others had required merely as a retainer. Voxeo also makes it easy for us to set up local access numbers for each of our customers, such as a 561 number for the meters we manage for the City of Palm Beach.

What’s up next for New Parking?

We have begun exploring some other markets, including the ability to hook our technology up with electric vehicle charging stations, which would allow drivers of electric cars to pay for a recharge as easily as they pay to park.

To learn more, visit the New Parking website.

Voxeo is excited to announce a partnership that will bring more sophisticated solutions to address customer care and communication challenges for banks, credit unions and other financial institutions. Waterfield Technologies – a leader in customer service solutions for the banking industry  – is joining Voxeo as a Voxeo Connect Certified Partner, combining Waterfield’s deep expertise in building solutions for financial institutions that increase customer retention, customer loyalty and engagement with Voxeo’s proven, carrier-grade platform that optimizes communications across IVR (interactive voice response), text, mobile and social channels.

The benefits of this offering are concentrated in five key areas:

• Customer experience: When institutions combine industry best practices with the latest technology, the quality of customer experience goes up while costs go down. This is particularly true for institutions which have not upgraded their financial IVR channels in many years. Waterfield and Voxeo provide a solution that dynamically adapts to customer communication preferences, streamlines common requests and reduces transfers to a representative, and unifies customer experiences across channels like voice, text, chat and mobile apps (both iOS and Android).
• Proactive customer care: With outbound IVR and SMS, your system can provide useful notifications to customers – such as payment reminders, and low balance alerts. Integrate with your current business-intelligence software and power personalized up-sell and cross-sell offers.
• Integrated business intelligence: Use built-in, powerful analytics to eliminate IVR bottlenecks that create customer frustration, understand customer behaviors and identify opportunities – yielding an overall improvement in service experience for customers and internal stakeholders.
• Self-service administration: With a system built on web standards, existing IT staff can make routine changes and updates as business needs change and customer communication preferences evolve, giving you more flexibility and control.
• Simplified security and compliance: Voxeo and Waterfield have created a system that is 100% standards-based and certified compliant, which supports two-factor authentication and in-queue PIN validation. This ensures the security of your automated customer interactions.

The banking and financial services landscape has undergone a seismic change in recent years, with mergers, acquisitions and other factors that encourage customer mobility – is your customer service keeping up with your customers’ needs?

Learn more and read our whitepaper, “Slashing Costs and Improving Customer Care in Financial Institutions” at www.voxeo.com/waterfield.

Earlier this week I outlined a webinar I was part of on Thursday about:

Do you want to learn how you can use outbound communication to build stronger relationships with your customers? Would you like to hear actual customer use cases of outbound communication? As your customers move into multi-channel communication across voice, SMS, IM and more, would you like how to use all those channels for outbound interaction as well?

The event itself is now over but you can still register and view the archive of the webinar. I’ve also made the slides available in our SlideShare account:

You are also welcome to download our whitepaper on “Best Practices for Outbound Customer Interactions” or create a free developer account to try out our outbound communications yourself!

UPDATE: The webinar is at 2:00PM US Eastern today, not 11:00am as originally posted. My apologies for the confusion.

Do you want to learn how you can use outbound communication to build stronger relationships with your customers? Would you like to hear actual customer use cases of outbound communication? As your customers move into multi-channel communication across voice, SMS, IM and more, would you like how to use all those channels for outbound interaction as well?

You can learn about all of this and much more on a free webinar sponsored by Speech Technology Magazine on:

THURSDAY, JANUARY 27th, 2011
2:00pm US Eastern, 11:00am US Pacific

You can register for free and either join the call live – or listen to the archive later if you can’t attend.

I (Dan York) will be on the panel along with industry analyst Daniel Hong and peers from CSG, VoltDelta and Nuance Communications. We’ll be covering topics including:

• Connect the dots between your outbound and inbound communications to reduce operational costs while boosting customer satisfaction
• Utilize Proactive Outbound Messaging to maximize contact center resources and enhance the customer experience
• Engage your customers with relevant communication across multiple channels
• Develop an effective outbound campaign that supports multi-channel interactions
• Execute a multi-channel outbound campaign interacting with customers in the medium they prefer: voice, SMS, social or more
• Develop a robust permission-based proactive communication strategy.

We’ll end with a Q&A session and it should be an interesting and educational event.

Here at Voxeo, we are a huge provider of outbound communication services, ranging from everything from standard “notification” systems to two-way speech-enabled interactions to multi-channel confirmation systems… and everything in between. You can learn more in our whitepaper whitepaper “The Ins and Outs of Outbound IVR“:

Datamonitor predicts the market for hosted Outbound Interactive Voice Response (IVR) services in North America alone will more than double from an estimated $213 million in 2008 to $524 million by 2013. Outbound IVR offers companies the ability to provide proactive customer service, deliver important notifications, expedite collections and more. In order to put the advantages of Outbound IVR to work for you, it is important to understand the intricacies of successful outbound calling, how it differs from your Inbound IVR solutions, and the importance of delivering a cohesive customer experience. This whitepaper will explore the business case for Outbound IVR and the critical success factors you need to know about before getting started.

You can also download a free version of Prophecy or signup for a free account in our hosted cloud to try out outbound notification yourself.

Please feel free to contact us if you have questions about how we can help you get started with outbound IVR. And please do join the webinar tomorrow to learn more!

Are you looking for a free IVR platform to use on MacOS X or Linux? Would you like to build applications with open standards like VoiceXML, CCXML and SIP? Are you tired of all the solutions out there that require you to do all your development on Microsoft Windows?

Here at Voxeo we believe in Unlocked Communications™ and believe that you should NOT be locked in at any level – including the operating system!

That’s why we make our Prophecy platform available for all three major operating systems at:

www.voxeo.com/prophecy

And of course, Prophecy is free to download and use.[1]

Sure, the majority of our downloads reflect the market and are for Windows, but we use all three operating systems internally and have large customer deployments on all of them.

The best part of all of this?

Prophecy is the same on all three platforms.

And your apps are naturally movable between versions… so if your servers are all Windows or Linux but your developers all want to use shiny Mac laptops, they can install Prophecy locally on MacOS X and build all the apps they want. When it comes time to deploy, those apps can be moved over to your Windows or Linux server. Same platform, same tools, same code.

Unlocked from the operating system!

If you are interested in learning more, just head on over to our Prophecy download page and try out a version for yourself! Heck, it’s free, so feel free to download it onto several different systems and figure out which version you like best!

P.S. And just remember, the Linux version is the one that we showed CEO Jonathan Taylor demoing that runs over 5,000 simultaneous connections!

[1] The free version of Prophecy includes a license for 2 ports of simultaneous use. It’s the exact same code as the commercial version, though, so if you want more ports you simply have to contact us to buy a license for more.

Last minute shopping trips, family gatherings, and out-of-town visitors. All contribute to the holiday rush that puts drivers in a less-than-cheery mood. This season avoid traffic backups and other problem areas with 511.

511 is the nationally designated abbreviated dialing code for real-time travel information. Callers can get instant updates on road construction, traffic, weather conditions, and more. It’s a free service that’s currently available to more than 70% of the U.S. population. 511 leverages interactive voice response (IVR) and speech recognition to provide drivers with anytime, “hands-free” access to information. If you find yourself in a jam this holiday season or want an update before hitting the road, give 511 a call. 

Voxeo partner, PBS&J, delivers Voxeo-powered 511 systems in Virginia and North Carolina. PBS&J provides reliable 511 IVR services – even during the holidays when traffic and weather conditions trigger huge fluctuations in call volume. The Voxeo-powered solution ensures PBS&J clients have high availability, on-demand scalability, and cost-effective bursting during usage spikes. Learn more about 511, PBS&J, and Voxeo in our new case study.

Interested in learning about the advantages of hosted speech solutions versus on-premise solutions? Or why you should or shouldn’t have to choose? Want to understand the pros and cons of pushing voice applications out “into the cloud”? If so, please join us today at 2pm US Eastern time for a free webinar hosted by Speech Tech Magazine and including speakers from Voxeo, Angel.com, Contact Solutions and Nuance Communications. To sign up, please go to this URL:

http://www.speechtechmag.com/webinars/roundtable/12nov2009/vox2

Industry analyst Daniel Hong from Ovum (formerly Datamonitor and author of Datamonitor’s IVR short list report) will start the session with a market overview and the whole event is hosted by Speech Tech Magazine’s David Myron. Key questions to be discussed include:

• How the incentives built into a hosted agreement impact the customer’s long-term results;
• How the arrangement should be set up for you to realize maximum savings;
• The capabilities to look for when selecting a provider;
• The role of monitoring, reporting, and tuning;
• The role of caller behavior analysis;
• The impact of service-level agreements on performance, availability, and caller experience;
• The limitations when handling different interaction types, such as touch-tone, mobile, speech, and authentication/verification; and
• Integration with customer and third-party data/solutions to meet unique call requirements.

It should be an interesting collection of viewpoints given the mix of vendors. Again, it’s free, so please feel free to sign up and join us at 2pm US Eastern, 11am US Pacific. The session will also be archived for later viewing.

Ever wished there was a simple way to do automated testing of your IVR or other voice application? Without a complex setup and without costing a great amount?

Back at SpeechTEK in August, our partners at Nu Echo announced the availability of their “Nu Bot Platform” for IVR Application Testing. Today, Andreas Volmer from our Cologne office published a review of Nu Bot and how it can interact with VoiceObjects over on the VoiceObjects Developer Blog:

NuBot – Automated end-to-end testing of IVR applications

Andreas provides some great screenshots and other information about how to use Nu Bot with VoiceObjects. He also points out that Nu Echo is still accepting participants for its Nu Bot Beta program, so you, too, can apply to try out the platform. I liked Andreas’ ending:

I can only recommend to get your hands on it and try it; it’s about time that we take automated testing more seriously in the IVR application business.

Indeed! Good to see Nu Echo getting this Nu Bot solution out there and I’d love to hear what others think of it.