Author:  Jim Mitchell

Developing a speech self-service application used to be much more complicated than it is today.  In days past, companies had to build their voice portals internally or outsource to someone with the expertise to build-to-spec – a process that could be time consuming, expensive and cumbersome.  Today, “componentized” or “building block” applications are giving companies easier, quicker and cheaper access to voice portals.

What are componentized applications? 

Throughout the years, we have found that many of our customers have had similar problems to one another, and have required related underlying solutions to solve them.  We asked ourselves how we could leverage these commonalities and take advantage of pieces of solutions or scripting that we had already developed, tested, implemented and proven at other customer sites.  We realized that it was possible to use certain standard components across our customers’ sites to help them get their speech applications up and running faster and enable them to save money on development and deployment costs.  Many of our customers today use these components as the building blocks upon which they build tailored applications that meet the unique needs of their customers.  This type of customization can increase your customers’ satisfaction, and also help you maintain a positive image of your company and your brand.

Say that you are a retailer who would like your customers to be able to call your 800 number, input their zip codes and receive information about all of your stores located within five miles of their homes.  Instead of building this application from scratch, which could take a long time and be cost prohibitive, you could deploy a generic store locator module with the underlying capabilities for this transaction.  You could then customize your application to provide information specific to your store locations. 

Componentized applications can be geared toward specific industries such as financial services, healthcare or retail, for example, and can be used in a number of ways.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 8:10 am and is filed under Collections, Contact Center Technology, Customer Service/Consumer Demands, Sales and Telemarketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.