Voxeo, now an Aspect company, has signed an agreement with managed networked IT services provider BT. Using Voxeo solutions, BT will provide low-cost, low-risk, cloud IVR, and automated self-service solutions to its customers.
Voxeo’s IVR platform will be integrated with BT Inbound Contact, a global voice network that routes voice traffic across 170 countries and allows multinational deployments to be implemented and managed centrally. Voxeo’s application development, management, and analytics platform, Voxeo CXP, will enable BT to build, manage, and monitor the performance of self-service solutions.
The key capability that BT wanted to provide their clients with is to serve their end customers with the ability to manage their self-service applications, says Tim Howling, sales director, global accounts, at Aspect.
“A client may not want to have to rely on BT every time they want to make changes. BT clients can host and manage their own hosted IVR applications, and provide reports on usage and change certain parameters,” Howling says.
BT Auto Contact offers self-service solutions allowing customers to access services 24/7 across multiple channels and reduces the business cost associated with providing those services by up to 90 percent when compared to live agent support, according to the company.
Howling says that both companies are seeing significant increases in the number of clients looking to operationally reduce their cost of service for their customers, and that BT is looking to offer the same consistent, self-service capabilities across whatever channel a customer chooses.
“Everything that goes around supporting agents is increasingly costly, and it’s not always easy to provide information to a caller,” he says. “We see an ever-increasing need to reduce those costs and balance that with an improved level of service to the customer and providing the right outcome the first time, every time. Instead of waiting in [a] long queue, there is increasing demand by customers for self service that not only reduces costs but also provides a more agile and responsive service to the end caller.”
The companies are also providing IVR in the cloud. Howling says that instead of clients having to go through a costly process of procuring hardware, implementing software and providing ongoing management, Voxeo and BT will provide those services.
“Companies would prefer to rely on specialists like Aspect or BT, tell us what they want, and…use this as a service, on demand, in the cloud,” says Howling. “They don’t need any architecture, software, or hardware, and they simply pay for it on a per use basis, or per transaction basis. [Cloud services] allows clients to react to market conditions with a click instead of taking months to deploy.”