Voxeo Talks

More companies are taking customer service to the cloud — from inbound and outbound IVR to two-way text to mobile web interactions.

• Is hosting your speech self-service solutions the right choice for your business?
• How will the solution scale to support additional communication channels?
• What are the important capabilities to look for in a vendor?

Join Chrysalis and Voxeo on Wednesday, June 22, for an educational webinar featuring Daniel Hong, Ovum Lead Analyst. Daniel will present findings from their new 2011 report, “Selecting a Provider of Cloud-based Speech Self-Service Solutions in North America.”

All webinar attendees will receive a complimentary copy of the new report – a $2,500 value.

Please join us:

Wednesday, June 22, 2011
10:00 AM US Pacific, 1:00 PM US Eastern, 7:00 PM Central European.

If you are unable to attend live, a recording of the session will be available later, but please register in advance to receive a free copy of the report.

Image credit: danyork

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!

A hybrid IVR platform is one that is available as a hosted/cloud-based solution and as an on-premise deployment. Just to be clear, we are not simply talking about two distinct offerings delivered by a single vendor. We mean one platform – offered two ways.   Benefits include the ability to migrate between deployment models at any time or to take advantage of both deployment models at the same time — with no changes whatsoever to your applications. That’s exactly what our partner Tele-Works did to enable Harris Computer Systems to serve a diverse base of utility customers.

Harris Computer Systems provides Customer Information Systems, billing software and other solutions to thousands of utility customers throughout North America. Harris recognized that IVR is a key component to a successful utility’s customer service department, but required a way to serve all of their customers – from the largest to the smallest – with one consistent solution.

Tele-Works provided a Voxeo-powered solution that uniquely supports both hosted and on-premise deployments, as well as inbound and outbound calling, from a single code base. The Tele-Works solution extends across Harris’ complete utility product portfolio, giving thousands of utility customers access to quality IVR at price points that were previously unattainable.  Read the case study here.

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.

We see it all the time – companies who deployed a standards-based voice application platform only to find out that they’re still locked in. How does that happen? After all, isn’t portability a key tenet of open standards?

Of course it is, but the fact is that your provider doesn’t want you going anywhere. To accomplish this, many vendors bundle proprietary tools that make it difficult to switch solutions should your requirements change down the road. Even standards-touting VoiceXML providers often use proprietary call control and VoiceXML tags to cleverly move lock-in from the platform level to the application level.

At Voxeo, we keep our customers by providing them with a better product and better support – never by locking them in. Voxeo offers the only VoiceXML browser to pass 100% of the VoiceXML Forum’s compliance test suite, including all optional tests, and the world’s most deployed CCXML browser. We support all of the secondary W3C voice standards and more SIP capabilities than any other vendor. Equally important, Voxeo strictly adheres to the principles behind open standards. The result is greater choice, unmatched flexibility, lower costs and true portability.

Since Voxeo’s customers own their intellectual property, they can switch providers, engage different development resources, or change their deployment model if requirements change.

With Voxeo you are free to:

• Move from hosting to a premise or hybrid deployment (or the other way around)
• Use your application development partner or VoiceXML development tool of choice
• Leverage the Voxeo VoiceObjects service creation environment to “design once and deploy anywhere.” VoiceObjects applications seamlessly work across all leading VoiceXML platforms and across multiple channels, including voice, IM, SMS and the mobile web. These phone channels can share the underlying dialog flow definition, business logic and back-end access, drastically simplifying development, maintenance, and reporting.
• Use your speech vendor of choice; Voxeo offers free built-in speech recognition and synthesis, as well as support for any MRCP-compliant engine
• Choose from a variety of TDM and VoIP carriers
• Run your application on any standards-compliant platform, including those of our competitors

If you are interested in learning more about Voxeo and our standards-based platform, contact us today.

If you subscribe to industry newsletters and frequent industry websites, you may have noticed an increased number of webinars and whitepapers on Outbound Interactive Voice Response (IVR). The recent flurry of activity isn’t surprising given analyst forecasts. For example, Datamonitor predicts the market for hosted Outbound 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. But to truly put the advantages of this technology 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.

At Voxeo, Outbound IVR is old hat. A large portion of our hosting business can be attributed to customers with high-volume outbound traffic. In fact, last month a Voxeo hosted customer made 1.3 million outbound phone calls in 1.5 hours. In our latest whitepaper, “The Ins and Outs of Outbound IVR,” we set out to share some of the knowledge we’ve gathered over the last ten years, including a few gotchas to be aware of, as well as success factors that will make your campaigns better and your customers happier.

Read Voxeo’s new Outbound IVR whitepaper now. You can also learn more about our Outbound IVR capabilities, including how to get started for free at www.voxeo.com/outboundivr

Calling all German-speakers! Would you like to learn about Voxeo’s platform for developing voice/IVR applications… auf Deutsch?

Being a global company we do periodically offer webinars in languages other than English and with our VoiceObjects team right there in Germany, it is rather obvious that German would be one of those languages.

So if you are in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, are part of a German company or just want to learn about our products in German, please join us:

Voxeo – Sprachanwendungen auf modernen IVR-Plattformen – Schnell, zuverlässig, kosteneffzient

Date: Thursday, April 23, 2009
Time: 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM CEST

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/569322645

Space is limited, so please do sign up soon. After registering you will receive a confirmation email with information about joining the session.

For those of you interested, here is German text of the webinar invitation:

In diesem Webinar möchten wir Ihnen zeigen, wie Sie mit Hilfe standard-basierter Hosting- und On-Premise-Plattformen ein breites Spektrum von Telefonieanwendungen – sprachgesteuerte Self Services, Call Routing, Mehrwertdienste, Benachrichtigungen und mehr – nutzen können. Erfahren Sie, wie Sie durch den Einsatz der IVR-Lösungen von Voxeo Ihren Kundenservice verbessern und gleichzeitig die Kosten senken können:

Flexibilität – IVR on premise, oder doch lieber hosted? Variable Hosting- und On-Premise-Modelle ermöglichen es, Telefonanwendungen jeder Größe und Komplexität wirtschaftlich zu erstellen und zu betreiben. Wir diskutieren auch den hybriden Ansatz, in dem saisonal oder tageszeitlich erhöhte Anrufaufkommen durch Zuschaltung einer Hosted IVR abgebildet werden können.

Verfügbarkeit – Wir garantieren 100% Verfügbarkeit, 24×7. Voxeo’s Hosted IVR ist voll redundant ausgelegt über mehrere, weltweit verteilte Rechenzentren.

Analyse und Transparenz – Die IVR als Black Box? Nicht mit der Technologie von VoiceObjects. Sie bekommen Informationen darüber, wie Ihre Kunden Selfservices nutzen, wie bevorzugte Navigationspfade in der IVR aussehen, und wir messen die tatsächlichen Erfolgs- und Automatisierungsraten. In Kombination mit Ihrem CRM System erhalten Sie damit eine wertvolle Ergänzung für Ihre Kundenanalysen.

Jenseits von IVR – Wir schauen über den Tellerrand. Ideen und Lösungen zur Entwicklung von Unified Self-Services – eine Anwendung, mehrere Kanäle (z.B. Voice, Texting, mobiles Web, …)

Please do join us (assuming, of course, you can understand German).

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Technorati Tags: voxeo, voice, voiceobjects, webinars, ivr, voip, telephony, telecommunications

So what are the steps of pushing your voice applications out “into the cloud”? Where do you begin?

As readers may sense by now, I have a fascination with network clouds (and cloud computing), and in the latest sign of that, I’ve kicked off a 4-part series over on the TMCnet IVR Community that we are sponsoring. In this first article in the series, titled “Pushing IVR Into The Cloud, Part 1: Why Make The Move?“, I talk about why you might want to consider moving your voice application out into “the cloud”. Here’s the intro:

With the world of Voice over IP (VoIP) comes an incredible number of options for how we configure our voice systems. Telephony can now be massively distributed over large networks. Remote workers or agents can be easily linked in to the rest of the office system. And many options exist to connect your VoIP telecom system to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).

In the midst of all of this is the challenge that application servers, such as those used for Interactive Voice Response (IVR), typically sit on a server somewhere in your network. And you need to make these application servers accessible to all the distributed parts of your network.

What if instead of running your IVR applications on a local server, you could run them “in the cloud?”

What if your IVR was out “in the network?” Accessible from all of your sites and from the PSTN? What if you could do this without adding to the load of your IT department?

In this four-part series, I’m going to explore what we are calling cloud computing and how you can push your IVR applications out into the network cloud. First, in this article, I’ll look at what cloud computing is and why people should think about it for IVR. Second, I’ll look at the security issues and what questions you need to be asking when considering a vendor for pushing your application into the cloud. After that I’ll discuss the key role that open standards play in allowing you to avoid vendor lock-in and I’ll conclude with steps you can take to make the move into the cloud.

The article continues on to talk about what cloud computing is, why you might consider it and why you might not consider it. Now the article focuses on “IVR” because… well.. it’s the IVR Community on TMCnet! However, you can pretty much go through that article and replace every instance of “IVR” with “voice application” or whatever term you want… the concept is the same.

As I note at the end, Part 2 will talk about the reliability/security aspects of pushing voice applications out into the cloud and the question: Can you trust the cloud to always be there for you?

Stay tuned for more… (and please feel free to let me know what you think as comments to this post.)

Technorati Tags: applications, voice, voice applications, ivr, cloud, cloud computing, voxeo, voip