Network convergence over Internet Protocol (IP) has brought significant change in customer contact. Today, customer contact is not restricted to centers. Customer contact takes place across an entire network of customer service resources ?? a customer interaction network. Within the customer interaction network, self-service applications play a vital role by allowing enterprises to take a new view of deploying IVR and speech solutions as simply new services on the network. In this session, you'll see how new, Web-based architectures and standards such as VXML, SALT and MRCP are changing the way self-service speech-enabled applications are deployed. Presented by:

Steve McElderry
Senior Manager, Product Marketing
Cisco Customer Contact Business Unit
How Natural Should a Voice Interface Be?

Since the inception of natural language processing (NLP) technology, its proponents have promised a revolution in voice interfaces for call centers, predicting a future in which callers will interact with IVR systems as if the systems were human agents. Exciting stuff, but is this really what you or your callers want? There's a reason why customers sometimes seek that human touch: because there's a real live person on the other end. Regardless of how lifelike an NLP-enabled IVR interface may be, it's still a machine and will never be as equipped to handle the more complex issues as a live agent. Plus, callers may become angry if they feel they've been tricked and the person they've been talking to is, in fact, a machine. But when a caller does have a simple request or transaction to complete, the less-than-human interface typically offered by today's IVR systems may be just the ticket. There are advantages to interacting with a machine: hold times are generally shorter; the caller doesn't have to make small talk with a live agent; and simple transactions can be handled quickly and easily. NLP does, in fact, have a definite place in the call center ?? companies simply need to learn how to leverage the advantages and sidestep the pitfalls. Presented by:

Norm Kayserman
Sr. Product Manager
Aspect Communications
Integrating Voice Self-Service with IVR for Improved Customer Experiences
(CCA-03)
- 05/24/05, 11:30am-12:30pm

Businesses want the best contact center solution available, but they also want the flexibility of a pay-per-use system that is both scalable and reliable. With managed services, companies can achieve this goal and provide a higher level of customer experience. Attendees will learn how open-standard voice self-service technologies can work with, or instead of, traditional hardware-based, touch-tone IVR systems to improve ROI and improve overall service operations. Attendees will also learn how providing customers with self-service applications tied to live agent assistance can increase customer satisfaction and significantly reduce operational costs. Presented by:

Brian Garr
Program Director and Segment Manager
IBM
Adopting Speech Into Mainstream Business Applications
(CCA-04)
- 05/24/05, 1:30-2:30pm

With the emergence of VoiceXML and SALT, businesses can quickly and easily add speech as a new interface to their business applications. In the past, voice applications were proprietary and required a large amount of customization and integration. Today, enterprise customers can buy packaged applications or develop their own speech-enabled applications. These new standardized interactive voice response (IVR) systems can be built with off-the-shelf hardware and software that can lower the acquisition and operation costs. However, there are trade-offs to be made regarding centralized versus distributed design, hardware versus host-based handling of media processing and call controls as well as TDM versus IP interconnections. This presentation will address the adoption of VoiceXML and SALT development platforms along with examples of where businesses are deploying speech-enabled applications to improve their business processes. Presented by:

Scott Wieder
Director of Market Development
Brooktrout Technology
The Real Value of a Speech Solution
(CCA-05)
- 05/24/05, 2:45-3:45pm

Now that the speech solutions market has survived its first decade, a dramatic but predictable shift is taking place. The arrival on the scene of open standards (VXML) and Microsoft-backed specifications (SALT) has had a major effect on the speech market: downward price pressure on voice platforms and infrastructure. As the market matures, the value of speech solutions will continue to move upward into the application layer, and anything below will be relegated to commoditized plumbing. This curve eventually occurs in all layered technology industries and has been seen in personal computing, data networking, telephony systems and many other industries. Companies are in a unique position to capitalize on this trend, and vendors that deliver enterprise software built to be 100 percent standards-compliant and platform-independent can establish market leadership. Today's enterprise speech software provides a superior caller experience through sophisticated speech applications that are fast to develop and easy to deploy and maintain. Presented by:

Steve Pollock
EVP and Co-founder
TuVox
Unifying Channels: The Business Value Of Voice And Web Convergence
(CCA-06)
- 05/24/05, 4:00-5:00pm

Since the advent of the Web, IT organizations have invested heavily in building new Web infrastructures and integrating them with enterprise applications. Now customer care organizations are being challenged to improve customer satisfaction while cutting costs. Additionally, marketing departments need to ensure that company branding and messaging is consistent across customer communication channels. Customer loyalty, satisfaction and retention are key to maintaining a successful business in commodity markets where customers have many product and service choices. However, while the telephone is still the primary customer interface for many companies, interactive voice response (IVR) systems that handle these calls have not received the same level of investment and/or attention as the Web. By centralizing control over customer contact channels, organizations can achieve brand consistency, can reduce the time it takes to affect business change at the customer contact level and, as a result, can improve customer retention, satisfaction and loyalty while reducing costs and increasing customer agent efficiency. This presentation will examine the challenges that exist in many organizations using Web and telephone customer contact channels, the negative impact these challenges have on business, why these problems exist and recommendations on how they can be corrected. Presented by:

Jonathan Eisenzopf
Strategic Product Director
Intervoice
Beyond Call Recording: Speech Improves Quality Assurance
(CCA-07)
- 05/25/05, 10:00-10:45am

Due to the highly competitive nature of the contact center industry, contact center operators need to deliver top-quality service to their clients. Best-practices dictate that a true quality assurance program requires reviewing 100 percent of all calls ?? a costly endeavor due to the requirement of a large, dedicated monitoring staff. Instead, most quality assurance programs rely on the bare minimum method of sampling a small percentage of total calls and manually reviewing the calls to determine the overall quality of a campaign. This is a risky proposition due to its hit-or-miss approach. By leveraging speech recognition technology, reviewing and analyzing 100 percent of calls is now feasible. During this session, we'll review current quality assurance processes, the limitations of those processes and how, by applying speech recognition technology, contact centers can increase quality assurance coverage. The session will compare and contrast simple call mining technologies with more sophisticated solutions that combine business rules with unrestricted, natural speech recognition to monitor conversations in a customer interaction environment. Presented by:

Lawrence P. Mark
Chief Technology Officer
SER Solutions
Targeting Speech To Mid Market Companies
(CCA-08)
- 05/25/05, 2:00-2:45pm

Typically, the focus of speech recognition vendors has been on Fortune 500 companies, which have been instrumental in allowing the general public to interact and familiarize themselves with speech technology. The current issue is about the smaller companies that want to incorporate speech into their business model yet can't afford to or don't have the technical know-how the Fortune 500 companies do. Speech vendors continue to ignore the market segment of mid-sized companies, though within the U.S. market alone, they number in the tens of thousands. Obviously, the business models of speech vendors must be altered to meet the needs of this fertile market. Not only must the price of speech technologies become affordable, but the actual development and implementation costs must also be within the scope of these companies' budgets and technical abilities. This session will focus on how speech vendors can address the needs and pricing obstacles that mid-sized companies currently face. Presented by:

Gerd Graumann
Director of Business Development
LumenVox
Call Center Applications Panel
(CCA-09)
- 05/25/05, 3:00-3:45pm

IVR has changed the face of contact center interactions, but guess what? IVR works well for only the simplest of tasks, such as getting a bank balance from a single account. Most contact centers don't stop there: they use IVR for everything and construct bewildering menu trees that annoy customers and make them zero out, or worse, run screaming to the competition. Enter speech, the one technology that will allow you to provide customers with nearly all the information they require, without daunting menu selections. This session will explore how best to use speech in the contact center to achieve lower operating costs and superior customer service. Presented by:

J.R. Sloan
Vice President of Product & Solutions Management
Syntellect Kipton Heuertz
VP Product Marketing, Americas
Eicon Adeeb Shanaa
CEO & Founder
Voxify Mark Abramson
CEO
Message Technologies, Inc. Chris Lotspeich
Director of Marketing
LumenVox Tracey Schelmetic (Moderator)
Executive Director - Customer Inter@ction Solutions Magazine
TMC
Bringing Speech Technologies to the Enterprise
(CCA-10)
- 05/25/05, 4:00-4:45pm

Speech creates many new opportunities for improved customer contact and improved efficiency. Rather than treat speech as an upgrade to an existing IVR system, companies can increase their ROI and improve customer satisfaction by treating speech as an enterprise initiative. By bringing in speech at an enterprise level, companies can provide their customers with a unified view of the company and eliminate the appearance of disconnected departments or silos. This presentation will explain how companies can improve current automation, automate a new range of tasks, consolidate toll-free numbers and call routing systems to get the customer to the right contact quickly and efficiently, reinforce their brand, and improve customer satisfaction and, therefore, retention. Presented by:

Ken Waln
Chief Technology Officer
Edify Corporation
Achieving the Right Mix in Customer Care: The Role of Speech in Enterprise Business Solutions
(CCA-11)
- 05/26/05, 8:15-9:00am

When deployed effectively, today's advanced speech technology can be incredibly effective in enabling a company's end-users to quickly reach the information they need without waiting for a live agent or weaving their way through a maze of touchtone IVR menus. However, sometimes customers simply need and expect the assistance of a knowledgeable live agent. Instead of viewing speech as a stand-alone, comprehensive customer care solution, companies concerned with cost and quality can achieve the most value by closely examining their existing operations to identify how speech can compliment and extend existing live agent operations for faster, more efficient call handling. Attendees will learn about the various speech deployment alternatives available to companies (both outsourced and in-house), and what internal and external factors to consider when selecting an enterprise speech solution; You'll hear real-world examples of how different kinds of businesses in a variety of industries have deployed speech within their companies to meet specific customer needs; and how speech can work in tandem with live agent and touchtone IVR solutions to achieve lower cost, more efficient call handling. Presented by:

Nancy Bergantzel
Director of Product Development
West Corporation
Improved Call Completion With Natural Language Processing
(CCA-12)
- 05/26/05, 9:15-10:00am

The session will emphasize the benefits of natural language speech application developments with the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for easier implementation of answering callers' questions, executing transactions with implicit correction opportunities. With the use of AI, users need very little business application customization and grammar development for higher caller transaction completion rates. The tool set to be discussed automatically generates, from a small corpus, robust speech grammars capable of supporting the natural conversational capabilities of the system. An added benefit, significant cost savings in the total cost of ownership can be attained using a natural language processing application. Presented by:

Peter Trompetter
Vice President Global Development
GyrusLogic, Inc.
Optimizing IVR/Speech Using Customer Behavior Intelligence
(CCA-14)
- 05/26/05, 1:45-2:30pm

According to Gartner, 92 percent of all customer interactions happen over the phone. Cell phone subscriber growth has outpaced Internet user growth, increasing call volumes and live agent interactions. Speech technologies can dramatically improve the IVR experience, but how do you really know how your customers are reacting to it? Is speech improving the customer experience or causing confusion? Where is the worst trouble spot? By seeing actual behavior in IVR and speech-enabled applications (not just random samples of behavior), you can quickly identify and improve the areas that are causing user frustration or drop-off, and define areas where automation can be effectively extended. Presented by:

Michael Chavez
Vice President of Client Services
ClickFox
At Your Service: Accelerate Contact Center ROI with Voice Self-Service
(CCA-15)
- 05/26/05, 12:45-1:30pm

This session will explain how contact center managed services providers can leverage voice self-service technologies to improve customer satisfaction, reduce call center operating costs and maximize return on investment in the contact center. Attendees will learn how voice self-service solutions can significantly decrease lengthy technology implementation processes and the extensive investment required by traditional speech development projects. Voice self-service technology offers a compelling value proposition for enterprises looking to dramatically reduce contact center operating costs, and providing customers with the right combination of speech-driven self-service applications and agent assistance can increase customer satisfaction and reduce overall costs by an average of 30 to 40 percent. Attendees will learn how to identify areas within a business where voice self-service technology can be used to reduce costs; implement a balanced self-service and live agent contact center strategy that supports overall business objectives; understand the value of customer segmentation for the enterprise; eliminate redundant investments in separate voice and Web technology infrastructures, ensuring a consistent customer experience across all channels and in both self-and agent-assisted transactions; and enable agents to track transaction information in real-time so customers do not have to repeat identifying information given during self-service Presented by:

Betsy Wood
Evangelist, Multimedia Applications
Nortel Networks