This year’s September 2008 Speechtek was collocated with Destination CRM.
Below are just a few of the interesting products and services we found at the conference.
Allegiance, Inc. offers technology and services to help companies capitalize on the business opportunity of engagement. Engagement is the emotional commitment customers and employees have to a company. It is based on how their expectations are met through interactions. Allegiance will soon be announcing that the engage platform will be integrated with several leading CRM vendors so that companies can view transactional data and engagement levels simultaneously. This gives them the ability to understand what, when, where and why customers buy their products and services. The result will be enterprise engagement management, providing predictive analytics, real-time data, transactional and attitudinal views, engagement quantification and the ability to link engagement efforts to business outcomes. www.allegiance.com.
ClickFox, Inc., a leader in Customer Experience Analytic Solutions, announced that Anna Convery has joined as Chief Marketing Officer. ClickFox delivers patented technology that analyzes customer interactions, behavior, and experiences across all enterprise touch
points to deliver true insight into the total customer experience. Regardless of the point of contact, ClickFox provides the ability to analyze customer behavior on any interactive platform: IVR, speech recognition, Internet sites, CRM and other applications. www.clickfox.com
FrontRange Solutions, Inc., developers of GoldMine CRM software, recently released new updates for its GoldMine Premium Edition 8.0 and Corporate Edition 7.5 products. Both versions are compatible with the recently released GoldMine Mobile 3.02 for Blackberry, providing real time access to GoldMine contacts and activity lists. In addition, GoldMine Premium Edition, Corporate Edition, and Enterprise Edition can be paired with the VOIP based IP Contact Manager with phone integration for screen pop, outbound campaigns, and intelligent, flexible routing – all creating history records for reporting. GoldMine Premium Edition and GoldMine Enterprise Edition also include Case Management for Customer Service at no additional charge. www.FrontRange.com.
GyrusLogic, Inc. announced the latest version of their unique conversational dialogue and natural language technology for human to system self-service applications; the system applies consistent automated questions and answers for different media types like voice, web, chat, e-mail, text messages, etc. The Platica™ interactive solution employs revolutionary, patented technology that allows people to ask questions and/or place orders or requests in their own language, allowing the system, in turn, to return the appropriate answer and/or follow-up question, in other words it’s generating a dialogue on the fly. www.gyruslogic.com
Inventivelabs released 'Voice Elements’. Developers using the Microsoft .NET framework (C#, VB.NET) can build speech-based voice solutions, port royalty-free. Along with traditional DTMF-based voice solutions, Voice Elements supports speech recognition technology from LumenVox, works with Dialogic hardware and HMP software, and has a free trial offer. Built on Microsoft’s .NET framework, the Voice Elements Developers Kit includes pre-made voice application modules, sample code tutorials, and reporting features such as call monitoring and logging. www.voiceelements.com
LucidEra recently introduced a new, free service called a “Pipeline Healthcheck”. The LucidEra Pipeline Healthcheck is a free assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of your company’s pipeline, sales people, and sales process. All you need is access to a company’s salesforce.com or other CRM data (they do all the heavy lifting), and the results are ready in 48 hours. The results focus on helping you do the following: (a) increase revenue by helping you identify the deals you should be focusing on based on uncovering the characteristics of deals that have the highest win rates, largest deal sizes, shortest sales cycles, etc. (b) increase pipeline risk by highlighting hidden issues such as stuck deals or portions of the forecast that don’t fit historical trends, and, (c) increase forecast predictability by providing an accurate assessment of your real win rates and sales cycle times based on deal characteristics, and by giving you the ability to interactively drill in deeper to uncover sales trends. Overall, customers gain valuable insights from the healthcheck that show them tangible ways to increase their sales productivity. www.lucidera.com
Nuance Communications, Inc. a leading provider of speech solutions, announced its “Can’t Stop the Stupid Calls” contest — a light-hearted program designed to provide call center agents a forum where they can shed light on the realities of trying to help some of those customers out there who really cannot help themselves. Through sharing their stories, call center agents will earn a chance to win a number of cash prizes. Nuance is collecting entries now at www.cantstopstupidcalls.com.
Nu Echo launched the NuGram platform. By enabling the development of both static and dynamic grammars, the NuGram platform provides a complete grammar solution that uniquely supports the full development and deployment lifecycle of speech recognition grammars.
The NuGram platform consists of two key components: NuGram™ IDE, an Eclipse-based grammar development environment, and NuGram™ Server, the dynamic grammar runtime solution. The platform provides a uniquely sophisticated grammar development environment with a complete suite of tools for developing, debugging, analyzing, and testing speech recognition grammars. www.nuecho.com
Nexidia announced the availability of Nexidia’s “QuickStart Libraries”, a knowledgebase of speech analytics search routines developed from years of experience investigating and analyzing a wide array of industry-specific business challenges. For search parameters requiring higher degrees of customization—for example, to fit company-specific terminology—the libraries enable Nexidia customers to significantly shrink development times by building on previous search queries and routines. Combined with Nexidia’s QuickStart Solutions, flexible deployment options, proof-of-concept trials, and scalability, Nexidia enables businesses to rapidly realize the value of their speech analytics initiatives while minimizing investment and deployment risks.www.nexidia.com
Nortel offers both premise-based and hosted approaches to delivering superior IVR applications. Nortel's newest product Interactive Communications Portal (ICP) is a software only voice portal that is collaborative, proactive, media adaptive, and multi-modal. Nortel's Hosted IVR service uses triple redundant, web-centric infrastructure to deliver "per minute" services. Both ICP and Hosted IVR are 100% standards-based, SIP and SOA optimized, leveraging Nortel's speech technology expertise and its commitment to "Business Made Simple". www.nortel.com
Portrait Software, a provider of next generation marketing software, announced Portrait Campaign Manager™, a campaign management solution that turns traditional direct marketing campaigns into profitable, ongoing and highly personalized customer dialogs. Portrait Campaign Manager is the first .NET-based solution able to harness customer data, interactions, inquiries and event-triggers to drive relevant campaigns that are bi-directional and more profitable. www.portraitsoftware.com