eircom Nominated for Customer Innovation Award from Hundreds of Applicants Worldwide
Belfast, Northern Ireland, June 1st, 2007 - SpeechStorm, a leading provider of advanced speech recognition solutions, today announced that their customer eircom, has been selected from more than 240 applicants as a finalist for the second annual 2007 Genesys Customer Innovation Awards.
Customer Innovation Awards finalists, strive to provide excellent customer service through the innovative use of technology in highly dynamic environments. eircom identified speech recognition self-service as the solution to establish automation on its customer service channel. SpeechStorm provided the eircom Voice Recognition (e-VR) solution, based on the Genesys VoiceXML platform and Nuance Speech Recognition technology. These technologies work together to create a dynamic call experience. The e-VR solution is an automated speech telephony service that is fully integrated via the SpeechStorm solution with over 20 eircom applications. It encompasses a rich suite of services including Computerised Telephony Integration to all consumer and business contact centres, allowing customer identification and query at the agent desktop.
“The goal of the awards programme is to recognise the world’s most dynamic contact centre environments,” said Wes Hayden, president and CEO, Genesys. “eircom has strategically leveraged the speech solution to achieve an optimal balance of customer traffic, internal resources and business outcomes. The most universal common thread among all of the innovators is the ability to link business issues to customer service, achieve optimisation and treat the contact centre as a strategic opportunity.”
eircom’s speech solution was fully implemented over an eight month period. Today almost seven million calls are handled annually by the solution. As a result of the e-VR solution, eircom is now able to deliver new and improved products and services in a flexible, 24/7 environment and they’ve seen huge improvements in the efficiency of the contact centre. eircom set a three-year target plan for improvement in the areas of customer self-service, call routing and a reduction in average call handling time.
Barry O’Toole, Head of Retail Programmes at eircom said, “eircom is committed to offering the highest quality customer service. The e-VR program clearly demonstrates how speech technology can improve the customer experience.”
eircom presented to a panel of analyst judges during the semi-finals at Alcatel-Lucent Forum, held in Paris in February 2007. The company attained excellent scores in several of the scoring categories, and its level of innovation with voice response, multiple self-service options, were all rated highly. eircom will receive recognition at G-Force London, Genesys’ annual user conference, next week.