Speech Heads, there has been no shortage of rumors flying around about Vicorp as of late.

In April, the London Gazette briefly reported that Vicorp U.K. Limited was being voluntarily “wound down,” or liquidated. The announcement followed a number of layoffs, wherein many staff members were immediately terminated at the end of March.  The company also seems to have moved offices in Berkshire, and, post-redundancies, is operating with what some have described as a “skeleton team” that has “risen from the ashes.”

“We are very much alive and well,” counters Brendan Treacy, chief executive office of Vicorp Group in an email to Speech Tech, though. “As a publicly listed company here in the U.K., we had the ignominy of having to inform the markets every time we hit funding or contract issues, and in the current climate being a small listed company is not a great place to be.”

Mr. Treacy claims the company has been transformed into more competitive business. Citing the $25 million of “sunk investment” in Vicorp’s xMP product, he says that the company can now afford pursue licensing and distribution more aggressively. He maintains that it has closed a number of deals in the last three months and intends to do “a lot more wholesale licensing.” He maintains, however, that Vicorp is not abandoning application development, and will continue “at rates that competitors cannot match.”

“After 28 years of trading, we are not about to give up and we have put ourselves into a strong position to maintain growth and service our high profile client base-all of whom continue to support us,” Mr. Treacy writes.

Congratulations to all of you Speech Heads out there in the IVR space!

According to DMG Consulting, the next two years are going to be sweetbacked, money-raking years. The whole kit and caboodle is going to be worth 2.7 billion clams by 2011.

In a press release, the consulting firm said that the recession has actually sped up the pace of IVR adoption and “infused momentum into the hosted/managed service” market-the latter being a trend that we’ve all been noticing around the office since back in January. In this shameless display of horn-tooting, I’ll refer all you IVR-cats to my feature that predicted as much (though truth be told it was a kind obvious call).

DMG says that IVRs are also flying off the customized shelves on the strength of new applications, rapid deployment, and recent innovations. It projects a four-year CAGR of 13.4 percent for hosted/managed-inbound IVR and 18.7 percent for the outbound IVR segment (great, more robocalls). Sales of premise-based IVRs are expected to decline as hosted and the overall market rise, perhaps a symptom of atrophied cash reserves and more trust in providers.

The consulting firm also notes that organizations of “all types”—-big ‘uns, small ‘uns, governments, higher ed., non-profits, and a dozen such entities of similar stripe that poo-poo’d hosted/managed service IVR yesterday are not only reconsidering today, but BUYING.

So to you future billionaires out there in IVRs, I ask the following: if in some smoky drawing room any of you should engage in some weird bet amongst yourselves about nature v. nurture and decide to put your conflicting ideas to the test by pulling some roustabout scamp off the street, furnishing him with millions of dollars, a mansion, butlers, and scores of elegant dinner dates with beautiful heiresses, please consider me your roustaboutish scamp.

Mint, the Wall Street Journal’s media arm in India, aimed at the nation’s growing ultra-rich class, reported yesterday that annoying outbound political IVR calls have finally made their way to the budding world power.

This is by no means a new development. In 2004, then Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, asked voters to vote for his Bharatiya Janata Party and its ruling coalition the National Democratic Alliance in a pre-recorded message. Despite the fact that both the BJP and the NDA were expected to sweep the polls and retain the lead it’d held firmly since 1999 after a brief stumble in ‘98. The NDA, however, lost to the Indian National Congress led by Sonia Gandhi, widow of former PM Rajiv Gandhi. Some attributed the loss to increasing unrest among Muslim Indians or the administration’s failure to make meaningful bread-and-butter changes for average citizens, compounded by the INC’s appeals for the “common man,” while others still (and you can count me in this contingent) believe voters may have turned on the NDA because they were annoyed by constant automated calls.

In my case, Speech Heads, annoying IVR has certainly turned me away from many a political candidate. In my hometown for instance, this obsequiously voiced woman was running from City Parks Comptroller. Every day I’d get dinner time calls about how she was going to bring the “winds of reform” to the way swing sets are funded across the city. Her opponent was swindling taxpayers with his boondoggle closed slide projects, nature trail, and dog park. Well, after three of those I was ready to vote for the incumbent and let him fleece the municipal property owners of all they had to build whatever Shangri-La caught his idle fancy.

Despite the conventional wisdom against such IVR calls, however, India seems dead set on proceeding, Mint reports.

“Parties are embracing telecom technologies with greater enthusiasm to connect with the electorate in the 15th Lok Sabha polls,” an unnamed staff reporter writes.

“Five years since the 2004 elections, India’s phone base, including mobile phones and phones of the fixed-line variety, has jumped nearly six times to nearly 430 million, up from some 75 million at the end of March 2004,” he adds.

The article goes on the quote a Mr. Vineet Kaul, vice-president of One97 Communications as saying, “Some parties [declining to name them] have decided to create a so-called IVR and toll-free IVR numbers that a voter can dial and get more information about the local candidates.”

Toll-free numbers? This won’t end well. When you start making automated calls, Speech Heads, you just invite the opposition to build $600,000 playgrounds. As my brother Adam B. says, punching a black leather gloved fist into an open black leather gloved hand, “You wanna move some votes, you need a personal touch.”

Full article here.

Apparently this past weekend was the in time to be blogging about IVR-building best practices. It was like some kind of IVR High Holiday. TMCnet opened services with a mammoth “Ten Tips for Improving IVR Functionality” just in time for Friday Shabbat, while Ivrsworld followed with a riveting Sunday mass, “Top Five Tips for Effective Use of IVRs in Call Centers.”

There was a lot of overlap between the two. Both suggested that you should never hide live agent options, make callers repeat any of their information, and keep prompts short and to the point-sound advice for a would-be designer.

Oh, boy, we really wish we could have been there to deliver you to our IVR Saturday call to prayer, but alas, we failed you Speech Heads. While Adam B. and I were selfishly enjoying our own weekend holiday from speech, we missed this trend. But let us better late than never, right?

Thusly, I would like to announce Speech Tech Blog’s very own:

Top Three Monday Tips for IVR-Building

(All of which are real original stuff, and cannot be found in any other top anything IVR list.)

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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.

Since I enjoy writing “Crushes & Hexes” so much, in the coming weeks, the blog will continue to feature breaking news updates from Ryan, while I focus only on regular features and product reviews. The newest addition to our features is “Round Up & Release,” a compilation of the biggest stories and developments from the speech tech world. While “Crushes & Hexes” focuses on the tech community as a whole, RR&R is just about speech. I hope you like it – it will appear every Thursday on the blog. As always, keep the comments coming, and send us feedback! Seriously, Ryan and I get all giddy when our readers comment. Sad but true — it’s the small things. Full post after the jump!

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It’s time for another edition of the Speech Tech blog’s regular feature, “Crushes & Hexes.” Appearing every Wednesday, we highlight companies, places, technologies, or people we deem praise-worthy, or cringe-inducing within the speech/tech/IT world. As always, your feedback is appreciated! Email us at blog@speechtechblog.com if you have a crush or hex item you’d like to see online.

Crush: MTA’s Long Island Railroad
Why We’re Loving It: I had to call the LIRR help number today to figure out how to pick up a roundtrip ticket I bought online. First, the IVR only gives you about four options, all of which are very simple (schedules, fares, tickets, etc), and makes it super-easy to transfer to an operator. I only had to wait a few minutes to talk to someone, and they immediately answered my question. No pranks today, unfortunately. I’m not letting the LIRR off the hook without a big diss, though. They’re losing MAJOR points for making their contact information insanely difficult for their customers to find (I had to Google “lirr + phone + customer service” to find the page). I’m willing to look over this fact, however, if it means I get the answer to my question in just one-and-a-half minutes. Grade: B-

Hex: Zipcar
Why We’re Hating It: In a few days, I’m moving five blocks away from my current pad, and bought a Zipcar membership to help me transfer the goods. All I wanted to do was figure out why I couldn’t reserve a car on the Web site – that’s it! First, I called their NYC office’s number. Immediately, I was told that if I was a member, I had to call a different number. Then, I called the 800-number, only to be bombarded with one of the lamest personas ever. Let’s just say that “press” sounded like “prezzzzzzzzzz.” There were only three options in the first menu, none of which related at all to what I was trying to do. I touched “3″ to “learn more about Zipcar,” but instead got bombarded with a super-long message about how to make sure my credit card payments wouldn’t be rejected. I finally heard a “press zero for an operator” and clicked away. While the operator was helpful, Zipcar MUST do something about their phone service – I had to turn my volume up full-blast to hear half of what the operator said. Grade: D

I got a phone call last week from Gilad Odinak over at Spoken Communications, in response to the blog post I wrote about the guided IVR used by Spiegel Brands and powered by Spoken. My gripe was that, when I called Spiegel to check out the IVR, all I got was a DTMF interface. Boo! I wanted to experience some guided self-service with natural language, but came up short.

Gilad told me that, at times, the Spiegel contact center and its hardware can get a bit funky — blame the network and the equipment. He said that I should try calling again, when the system wasn’t all wonky. Well, I did today and am happy to say I got to chat with “Lindsay,” the virtual agent who guided me through a few ridiculous requests I made. Here’s a transcript: (more…)

Over the past month, I have been investigating agent-assisted IVRs, and working through some of the implications the technology may have on the contact center/IVR space. Today, I decided to give them a try. One company that uses the guided IVR, Spiegel, talked to me during an interview about their experience with the IVR, which is provided by a vendor named Spoken Communications. I called up Spiegel’s toll-free number (1.800.345.4500), was greeted by a standard welcome message, given the choice of four prompts, and…..was put on hold for a live agent.

I was not expecting this! Though Spiegel owns a variety of other retail companies – I tried two others, as well – I never got to experience the company’s guided IVR. According to both Spiegel and Spoken, I would be greeted by a simple How can I help you? (natural language! yay!), but no such message popped up. So, what’s the deal? Was I horribly misinformed, or did I call the wrong Spiegel Brands company?

I really wanted to test out the guided system, but have come up empty-handed. If anyone has information about how to access the guided IVR for Spiegel, let me know. When I try it out again, I’ll be sure to post with my review. Until then, see the post below for editorial assistant Ryan Joe’s recounting of his mother’s IVR nightmare.

Let’s hope the airline in question cleans up its act! Or else face the wrath of Mrs. Joe.