At last year’s G-Force in San Diego, the company unveiled its Dynamic Contact Center (DCC), bringing the contact center beyond the phone to include customer contacts that come in from the Web, email, chat, fax, text message, and any other mode imaginable. Not to be outdone, this year, its big launch is the Intelligent Customer Front Door (ICFD), taking DCC a step further to bring a level of personalization to those interactions and tying them all together through front- and back-end business processes.
In just a week or two since first announcing the solution, it has already attracted big-name partners like Nuance, TuVox, and Voxify, all lending technologies to the effort. Interest has already built among the user base as well, with Air France, Belgacom, and T-Mobile among the first to sign on.
What makes ICFD so special is that it promises to make customer service convenient, consistent, personalized, responsive, and proactive; something badly needed in an age when customers have rising expectations from their company interactions, are super-empowered with information, and have the propensity to tell the world about good or bad experiences through things like blogs (Ed: See our user reviews for proof), and social networks. Companies have no less of a responsibility to learn and know as much as they can about their customers, and can leverage that through the ICFD.
As Brian Bischoff, Genesys’ vice president of voice platform sales and solutions told me, it’s all about eliminating customer frustrations in an age when 44 percent of customers who stopped doing business with a company did so because of a bad customer contact center experience.
Gone are the days when an IVR can contain a caller. Do that, and it¹s not just ‘Click’, but ‘Click and I’m gone’. ICFD could be a just the shot in the arm I need as a customer to not only continue doing business with a company, but to also walk in the front door and do more business with the company.

San Antonio is the seventh-largest city in the United States, and the cultural gateway to the American Southwest. It’s also home to this year’s G-Force, Genesys Telecommunications’ annual customer conference. As the first day of the conference comes to a close, I can’t help but feel a sense of novelty. Compliments of Genesys, I have my first metal belt buckle (with the Genesys logo emblazoned on the front, of course), a cowboy hat, and bandana, none of which I have any idea how I’m going to get on a plane. (Ed: Wear it on the plane!)

I also took in a bullriding competition, armadillo races, and a real Texas BBQ, and probably ate more ribs in one night than I will all year. But all the cool stuff aside, there’s much more to the conference than Texas-style fun. There’s a lot of work going on as well.

With more than 1,300 attendees from all over the world, it’s the largest G-Force ever, according to the Genesys people. This year’s event has seen a large number of Latin American customers (nearly doubled from last year), indicating just how large the call center industry is growing in that part of the world. In Brazil, Internet service provider UOL is taking more than 1 million calls a month from the country’s 33.1 million Internet users, and its biggest challenge is dealing with rapid growth using outdated technologies and poor system design. It turned to Genesys to bring all its customer-facing applications (phone, email, Web chat, etc…) together, and has achieved staggering first-call resolution, proper call routing, cost reductions, worker productivity, and sales growth as a result. Unibanco, a Brazilian bank, is handling 10 million calls a month with just 6,000 agents using Genesys systems.
G-Force is an international event, and American, Canadian, European, Australian, and Asian companies are also represented in full force. The one lesson from all this: No matter where in the world it may be, call center technologies are alive, well, and thriving. From Panama to the Philippines, Rio de Janeiro to the Rio Grande, may the G-Force be with them.

Speech Tech’s managing editor Len Klie will be attending the Genesys G-Force Conference this week in San Antonio. Being the task master I am, I’ve asked Len to blog from the conference during his stay there. Look back tomorrow for his first post, as well as Ryan’s logo for Len’s adventures - check out my VoiceCon logo for proof of Ryan’s MS Paint prowess. And now, your Monday morning moment of Zen:Julie the Amtrak Lady, a la Saturday Night Live.

You may remember my previous review of free voicemail and STT provider YouMail. Well, rather than writing a freaked-out and angry email or making a furious phone call, the people at YouMail were kind enough to do a follow-up interview with me following my review. We went over how to better use the features and navigate the system (I griped that the prompts were often confusing and hard to understand). I let them share their piece, and got some first-hand advice on how to use the system.

So, after speaking with them, I can say this: because I’m lazy, I like this service. I do not care about the ability to make personalized greetings for my callers, nor do I want transcriptions. My favorite feature is the audio file of each voicemail, which is sent automatically to my email account. Yes, I am too lazy to pick up my phone and actually call into my voicemail. Instead, I can put on my headphones and listen to the file play. Sometimes, for laughs, I read over the voicemail they transcribed and see how horribly wrong the technology was. One more YouMail bonus: when playing back your voicemails, they start with the most recent one first. Gnarly.

The verdict: because I’m a sloth, I liked YouMail’s service. One facet of it. And, because I’m too lazy to cancel my account, I’m keeping YouMail for now. Am I excited about this? I don’t know. I’m also apathetic.

Following a completely speech-unrelated weekend, we’re back at work….begrudgingly. (It’s in the 70s! There is sun!) Anyhow, remember that V-ENABLE test run we’re doing? It’s still going on! But to keep you up to date, here’s big news V-ENABLE released today: it has spun off a new service called FreeMobile411. Available for download, the program works multi-modally. Alas, you must own a Sprint phone to use it. Bummer!

Here are the details:

- The application combines both speech and text. To find a business or category, users speak what they’re looking for. The results then appear on the screen in text format.

- If the caller is still unable to find their desired search, they can access an operator.

- It’s ad-supported. Frown face.

- The numbers: 140 million residential and 14 million business listings.

- It also includes maps, driving directions, and names of nearby businesses.

For more info, check out the press release here. Yes, it’s in PDF - sorry!

[Image via PrivateLine.com]

For those interested in updating your speech rec parameters, SpinVox had compiled a list of popular US and Canadian slang. The company’s Voxgeist dictionary is tuned into a country’s ever-changing vernacular.

For your enjoyment, here are the Canadian words, ranked in order of popularity, after the jump.

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It’s Pope-Mania here in New York today, and, soon, Passover time (Chag Pessach Samaiach V’ Kasher!). Anyway, religion aside, let’s talk about directory assistance - it doesn’t get much more agnostic than that. So, once again, it’s time to test out some speech products. This time, we’re aiming our sights on V-ENABLE. And since I’m sadistic, or just a responsible editor, I’m making Ryan test it out with me. We’ll be test-driving V-ENABLE over the weekend. It’s a directory assistance company that also offers access to live operators if needed. That’s great, because when you live in the city and are on a crowded street, GOOG-411 usually catches the woman next to me yelling at her child, not me saying “BARNES AND NOBLE.”

We’ll report back to you next week with our results. We here at Speech Tech are some tough critics - we only give out two ratings: fail, or succeed. So, with that in mind, let’s V-ENABLE knocks our socks off. I can tell Ryan is already annoyed by this assignment: “Does this mean I have to listen to ADS?” I hope not, Ryan.

[Image: Uath.org]

I wish there were two of me. No, seriously — except not in that creepy way portrayed in the venerable film Mulitiplicity. Because, seriously, there is way too much news on which to report for this issue of Round Up & Release. So sit back and relax, unless you live in California, because, according to scientists, you will be hit with a catastrophic earthquake within the next 30 years. No! Google! Apple! I’m already sad.
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The downshot of being a reporter new to the industry: when I write a feature, I have to research from the ground-up. That’s fine when I’m writing about a specialized area like translation/localization, or a new area like multimodality.

But when I write about contact centers, which sometimes seem like the locus of speech technology, there are occasionally stones that I don’t always manage to tip over. Pardon the tired metaphor.

I spoke with Voxify yesterday for a news story. The CEO, John Gengarella, is very confident of his technology, and his customer list is impressive.

Basically, Voxify delivers non-static applications such that call flows, for instance, vary as per the needs of individual users.

“So if one guy is writing static VXML apps, he’s got to write ridiculous amounts of code for all the potential traversals of that call flow,” says Gengarella. “If you’re dynamically generating code, you’re literally navigating the application in real time. So I may change something based on the caller experience or some awareness I have of you, and I don’t have to write new code for that. (Voxify) dynamically generates the call flow based on who I’m talking to and data I have on your personal profile.”

I have to admit, this is not something I’m familiar with. I’m chalking it up to my own inexperience. But if any of you out there have opinions or insight into this methodology, I’d welcome your comments.

So, have you ever noticed how many images of people speaking on headsets/in call centers are on the Web? Or used in ads for contact center technology providers? Because, ugh….I have. So, I decided to make a little gallery of some of my favorites. Click on the link to see the photo in question!

This one is confusing – is she outside? Is she in a glass-encased environment? What exactly is going on here? She also looks totally Scandinavian. I can spot a fellow Viking anywhere.

I am super high-tech call center agent. I have 0’s and 1’s in front of me to represent the Information Age, computers, and the vast array of information contained within my call recorders and speech analytics system.

I’m willing to bet good money this picture was made when “Roseanne” was still running original episodes. Either way, she’s having fun. And is that a headset/actual phone combo? Whoa!

Whoever made this image: thanks, you have totally creeped me out, and ruined my Friday night.

In the words of Wayne’s World : “Extreme close-up! Whoaaaa!”