The UNDISBUTED world leader in Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems, Periphonics, has joined forces with Dimension Data Interactive (DDI) to bring its solutions to SA`s contact centre market.
Periphonics, a Nortel Networks Company, has installed systems in over 50 countries around the world and holds the dominant market share in most.
Matthew Woodcock, Periphonics country manager for SA, says Periphonics products are aimed at the high-end contact centre market - the same market which is well served by DDI in SA.
"An IVR solution can no longer be viewed as a standalone technology. DDI has clearly recognised the importance of IVR in the contact centre environment and, more importantly, has the rare capability to integrate it to provide users with an end-to-end solution.
"This will be enormously beneficial in driving Periphonics` penetration into the SA market," he adds.
According to DDI product director Neville Cousins, the Periphonics suite complements DDI`s existing Best-of-Breed contact centre infrastructure offerings and offers users a new degree of user-friendly, automated customer interaction.
"IVR has moved beyond facilitating automatic call answering to incorporate the intelligence required for the provision of self-service solutions within a contact centre was well as integration into a Web environment," he explains.
"The Periphonics product suite utilises such sophisticated technologies as advanced speech processing with large vocabulary recognition (LVR), natural language processing and text-to-speech as well as interactive processing via Web browsers, messaging and fax.
"Indeed, these products can be used effectively to manage customer relationships by automating call and transaction processing, increasing call centre agent productivity and creating new revenue opportunities for users."
Advanced speech technology can enhance customer access to automated services. Combined with LVR technology, it enables the system to recognise thousands of words and sentences spoken naturally by callers. This enables users to achieve greater automation by off-loading calls from agents and reducing call lengths.
"In addition, by allowing customers to speak their requests, they have an easier, more user-friendly interfaced to a company`s telephone-based services. They can say what they want directly, without having to navigate through multi-level menus.
"Meanwhile, the text-to-speech feature allows the system to convert text data obtained from a database into synthesised speech for the caller to hear. It is ideal for environments where very large or frequently changing database information makes pre-recording of responses impractical," Cousins concludes.
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