RightNow Announces Voice Experience Manager

RightNow’s  new generation Voice Experience Manager was released as part of RightNow CX November 2010. The new Voice Experience Manager allows businesses to identify callers, determine why they are calling, and then route calls to the appropriate destinations.

Key capabilities of RightNow Voice Experience Manager include:

• RightNow Voice Library: More than 6,000 prebuilt voice application modules that encapsulate best practices in common business processes, voice user interface design, and tight integration to RightNow CX. These modules enable rapid deployment of voice solutions while offering rich personalization and improved management for voice-enabled applications.
• Personalization Engine: Enabled by the RightNow knowledge foundation and CX platform, the Personalization Engine allows a single voice application to deliver dynamically generated information, customized for each caller, based on inputs, preferences, interaction histories, and contexts.
• An open standards-based Eclipse application development environment that supports a growing ecosystem of voice application developers, driving innovation in voice application design, and cost savings in voice application maintenance and support.

Daniel Hong, lead analyst for customer interactions at Ovum, says IVRs are commonly misused within organizations. Callers are often misrouted or lost in an IVR maze because they and their issues were not identified at the beginning of the call. “Simply building, deploying, and tuning IVR applications (self-service and routing) is not enough to achieve long-term success. Businesses must dedicate resources to continuously improve and optimize IVR applications on an ongoing basis. This requires significant post-deployment monitoring and tuning but will produce the best user experience for customers and help drive the automation and customer satisfaction rates higher. The focus should be on customer,” he says.

And, although many organizations have yet to implement technology like Voice Experience Manager, changing times suggest that they should, Hong adds.

“Looking forward, it makes sense for businesses to improve customer service over the voice channel as it accounts for the majority of communications between enterprise and customer – as the world becomes more multichannel the need to improve customer service in the voice channel increases exponentially as a phone call with an agent can become the last resort for customers,” says Hong.

”RightNow is attempting to move enterprises away from customer avoidance via automation and toward technologies that enable customer identification, segmentation, and intelligent routing that matches callers with the most helpful resources,” adds Ryan Joe, another analyst at Ovum.