IVR

Increasingly, the role of customer care is becoming more central to a company's success. Speech recognition software provider Nuance has helps companies satisfy the service expectations of their customers, and offers interaction solutions for the voice channel that helps enhance business performance.

As per a recent press release, BT Business will implement Nuance's (News - Alert) natural language call steering solution as part of a drive to improve the customer service experience and to drive efficiencies in customer service operations. An announcement to this effect was made by Nuance Communications (News - Alert).

Speech-enabled call routing solutions such as Open Call Steering encourage the use of self-service systems, reduces the number of misrouted calls, improves automation rates by connecting callers accurately, improves the caller experience, and ensures consistency so that caller experiences are identical.

BT (News - Alert) reviewed a number of solutions by various companies, and identified that the Nuance solution would help its one million U.K. business customers the best. The new service is expected to help customers to self-route the call easily. In addition BT will be able to more accurately route the 10 million inbound calls it receives annually. This way, service representatives can spend more time actually solving customer related issues, as opposed to transferring calls.

 "We want our customers to be able to concentrate on running their businesses rather than their networks and IT," Bruce Carter, customer experience director, BT Business said.

Carter further added that a first rate call steering solution would make it easy for customers to contact BT when they needed to and this would reduce the time it took to help them. Nuance's natural language service would help them streamline and simplify the process of improving customers' experience.

"With customer service a key differentiator in this competitive market, BT Business has identified how it can transform its inbound contact strategy with call automation," Ian Turner, GM, Northern Europe, at Nuance Communication,said.

Turner emphasized the importance of good customer service and said that with nearly 75 percent of all customer interactions still taking place through the telephone channel, it was imperative that companies deliver levels of service that consumers want and rightly expect from call centers,  to create long-term brand loyalty.

Nuance is a reputed provider of speech, imaging and customer interaction solutions for businesses and consumers around the world. Its technologies, applications and services make the user experience more compelling by transforming the way people interact with information and how they create, share and use documents.

BT is a provider of communications solutions and services operating in 170 countries. Its principal activities include the provision of networked IT services globally; local, national and international telecommunications services to customers.

In a related news item, Nuance announced recently that the companies recently entered into a five-year joint-research initiative designed to advance next-generation natural language speech technologies.