Comms Technology Success Story
July 10, 2008
Communications Enabled Business Processes seems one of the more colourful areas in comms technology innovation right now.
Whilst many companies are fiddling with instant messaging and phones to ‘improve’ internal productivity for their users (is there a problem to be solved here? - seems a bit grey to me), there are others concentrating on real business benefits, and getting their rewards.
Congratulations Voicesage, it re-invigorates to see real, measurable changes taking place.
The drive to increase competitive advantage through real cost reduction whilst improving customer service is always going a better sell to management than ‘productivity’ tools. (UC)
I believe strongly in productivity tools, but Senior Management will always tend to think that employees will then hurry up, only to then wait for something else - and there aren’t ready figures to support the productivity investment.
Contrast this with measurable reductions in cost, and measurable improvements in cashflow, and better customer service (immeasurable benefit), and you can see what’s happening.
I suppose that’s the fourth time I’ve said measurable, so I may be overstating the point.
Of course, this has a lot in common with “interactive voice response, or IVR” of the 90’s. However, IVR always had a large risk element that any bespoke project can carry with it, which prevented many medium sized companies from following through.
Customers often weren’t confident enough in what they thought they might want from IVR. Those that were over-confident enough to go for it, tended to spend the next 12 months arguing that their suppliers hadn’t read their minds sufficiently well.
With Voicesage hosted system, this risk is reduced drastically, and trials, demo’s and ongoing ‘pay as you use’ are the way past these objections.
The second improvement over IVR (and now CEBP I suppose), is that Voicesage describe their technology in ways their customers understand.
automated interactive voice messages to customers
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Thanks for the coverage here Matt. You are of course right when you point out that we at VoiceSage focus on selling benefit, not features. I would even go a step further….. we sell improvements in key metrics. For instance, “no shows” in appointments: you’ve booked appointments with clients and they don’t show up (wow, expensive). How about thinking about the value “locked away” in those missed appointments and then thinking about charging on a value-delivered basis? The Otto example is particularly gratifying for us as a company as they were super diligent in their ROI calculations, and I am happy to report that with returns that are measured in the hundreds of percent, Otto are actively looking at other processes that can be communications enabled.