The Blackfoot Telecommunications Group Achieves 58% Automation

ISELIN, NJ - The Blackfoot Telecommunications Group announced that it has achieved an automation rate of 58% for Directory Assistance (DA) business and government listings through its implementation of Telelogue's Voice Directory Assistance (VDA). The VDA is providing voice automation of DA calls for local and national listings, and provides operator handoff as needed through a partnership with a call center. "We are already seeing the benefits that the VDA performance brings to our customers," stated Rob Ferris, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Blackfoot. "We look forward to rolling out the next phase of our automation plan with Telelogue." Telelogue's VDA has handled more than 10,000 listing requests and has fulfilled 58% of all calls requesting a business or government listing. In these cases, the VDA fulfills the caller request by reading out the listing number and providing an automated option for call completion. No human operator is involved in these calls. All calls that are not fully automated are partially automated -- they are handed off to an operator who receives a screen pop of any information the caller said, including city and state. "We are excited and encouraged by the Blackfoot performance, which signifies the highest automation rate for DA ever reported by a carrier for an implemented system," said Robert W. Burke, Telelogue's CEO. "We expect the automation rate to improve as we methodically enhance VDA performance, even without increasing dialogue levels. In addition, we will soon roll out our existing residential listing automation capabilities to Blackfoot, and other roadmap features upon general availability including automation of Spanish requests, requests for Canadian listings, reverse lookups and address requests."