Canada's Largest Telecommunications Provider Calls on Nuance Speech Solutions for Excellence in Customer Care
MENLO PARK, Calif.--Jan. 16, 2003--Nuance , the speech experts, today announced that Bell Canada, Canada's largest telecommunications carrier, has teamed with Nuance to voice-enable its 310-BELL customer service line. Designed to simplify the customer experience and increase caller satisfaction for its millions of residential customers, this sophisticated voice-driven call steering application quickly and accurately routes incoming customer calls to more than 70 customer care information channels, including live agents and underlying self-service applications. The application is one of the most innovative customer care initiatives undertaken by a telecommunications company, and is an industry indicator that speech technology has arrived as a cornerstone of integrated customer care initiatives.
The highlight of the new system is "Emily," a custom designed speech recognition persona who acts as the greeter for callers and responds to customers' requests and queries by automatically routing the callers to the right 310-BELL information destination. Emily utilizes Nuance's Say Anything(TM) natural language speech recognition technology, an innovation uniquely suited to meet the requirements of Bell Canada's many phone-based customer care options. Say Anything allows callers to speak naturally, free of touch-tone mazes, while the system identifies key concepts in the spoken request to determine each caller's needs.
"Speech is central to an integrated customer service strategy and it provides a natural way for Bell Canada to automate customer interactions with information and supplement other customer service channels such as the Internet," said Ron Croen, president, CEO and chairman, Nuance. "Nuance is delighted to be Bell Canada's speech solutions provider, bringing to bear our depth of technology, products and services to deliver on Bell Canada's vision for customer care."
Bell Canada and Nuance teams closely collaborated on the successful development of the new Emily system, from concept to application design to testing and deployment. The project team met aggressive goals for scope, timeline and budget, and moved from project approval to successful pilot in less than six months.
"In years to come we'll look back and see that Emily was one of the very important steps we took to bring simplicity to customers," said John Sheridan, president and COO, Bell Canada. "She's proof that technology can be used to make things easier for customers, not more complicated. Emily is a symbol of change for the company and its customers and we expect that she'll become the inspiration for re-inventing the ways in which we serve our customers."
The Emily persona was custom developed by Bell Canada and Nuance Voice User Interface designers in order to create a unique personality for 310-BELL and extend Bell Canada brand attributes to the "voice" of its customer care center. Emily was designed for growth, and the speech-driven system can be easily expanded to accommodate the customer care requirements of all 310-BELL callers. The initial deployment of the enhanced 310-BELL system is underway in the province of Ontario, available to English speaking customers of Bell Canada's residential services. In the coming months, Bell Canada plans to gradually introduce Emily in phases throughout its entire service area. The system's back end applications are fully scalable to allow for broad expansion of the speech-driven services over time.
Nuance's Say Anything technology represents the state of the art for speech recognition evolution, and Nuance is the only speech vendor with significant experience delivering natural language systems today. Key business benefits of applications based on Say Anything include increased automated call completion, improved customer satisfaction, more efficient use of call center agents, and the ability to consolidate multiple 800 numbers into a single centralized phone gateway that customers can use for all of their needs. Speech also delivers substantial customer satisfaction benefits. According to a recent Nuance Speech User Scorecard survey, 80 percent of callers prefer speech-driven self-service to touchtone systems because of the speed and ease of access to information that speech enables.
Emily is the latest Nuance-powered speech recognition project deployed by Bell Canada Enterprises. Others include Bell Mobility VoiceNET wireless information portal providing speech-driven access to news, weather and email, and Bell Canada's Speech Enabled Field Access (SEFAS) field technician automation system.
About Nuance
Nuance is the speech expert. Nuance's speech software solutions enable automated access to everything from account balances to flight information, email reading to voice activated dialing - accessed using nothing more than the power of voice and an ordinary phone. In markets around the world, leading enterprises and telecommunications carriers - including British Airways, Nomura Securities, OnStar, Sprint PCS, United Parcel Service, Vodafone, and many more - work with Nuance to reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction and retention, create new sources of revenue and improve security. Nuance is headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif. and has offices around the world. For more information, visit www.nuance.com or call 1-888-NUANCE-8.
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