The service, Property24Voice, enables potential homebuyers to search for the home of their choice by phone and allows subscribing estate agents to upload new listings to the service real time just by making a call.
Property24 is a joint venture between media giant Media24, and Absa, SA's leading mortgage lender. The property service lists more than 38 000 properties for sale daily, and serves over 1.8 million page impressions a month to 43 000 individual users. From its inception, Property24 has used technology to facilitate interaction between homebuyers, homesellers, and other players in the real estate sector such as estate agents, lenders, attorneys and insurers.
Alfie Naidoo, Absa e-channels managing executive, says the addition of the speech service is in line with the banking group's strategy for the ongoing development of its self-service channels. Following the successful implementation of the Property24Voice service, Absa is looking to implement a similar solution at its own contact centre.
"Our aim is to expand the awareness of speech-enabled banking, and to reduce the range of telephone numbers that our clients have to keep on hand. With the speech solution, we are able to offer our clients - homebuyers and estate agents - multiple services through one contact number."
The SpeechWorks solution provides greater access to Property24's database of thousands of properties throughout SA by making its online house-hunting services available to people without access to the Internet.
With Property24Voice, anyone with a phone can dial 083 900 2424 and search all the home listings that are available on the Web site. Callers can search by the city or suburb they choose, by preferred price range, and by the type of property they are interested in. The service also benefits estate agents, as they are no longer required to have computer access in order to list properties for sale.
Property24 users have started to use the service regularly and call volumes are climbing daily.
"What really impressed us was the ease with which the solution was implemented," says Naidoo. "We expected to go through some initial growing pains as this is a complex environment in which clients expect a high level of service, but the solution was implemented quickly without any disruption.
"As a result, user acceptance has been excellent. We are certain the number of callers will grow dramatically with ongoing marketing of the solution."
Partner collaboration
The speech-enabled solution was developed by Intelleca Voice & Mobile using SpeechWorks' OpenSpeech Recognizer speech recognition software, and SpeechWorks' Speechify text-to-speech software on the SpeechGenie platform from VoiceGenie Technologies.
"The Property24 Voice solution is a milestone in the deployment of speech recognition and VoiceXML in SA. Users can select from one of 10 000 cities, towns, or suburbs - the largest speech undertaking in the country to date. The advances made by Intelleca in the deployment of these technologies is paving the way for a range of user-friendly, self-service telephone services," says Michael Renzon, MD of Intelleca Voice & Mobile.
"Speech technology creates a superior caller experience, allowing customers to access information at any time, from anywhere, quickly and easily, without cumbersome touchtone menus or the need for Internet access," says Steve Chambers, chief marketing officer at SpeechWorks.
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