Convergys Rolls Out New Voice Portal and Mobile Self-Service Offerings

Convergys today introduced Intervoice Voice Portal 6.0 (IVP 6) and its next-generation application creation environment, Interaction Composer. With IVP 6, clients can now create highly personalized speech solutions, leveraging a set of rules and policies that can be easily constructed by integrating with the Convergys Dynamic Decisioning Solution. With this release, Convergys also introduces a voice portal platform designed to facilitate the development of multimodal applications that enable mobile self-service.

For the past eight years, the number of mobile phone subscribers has grown globally at an average rate of 24 percent year over year. "For enterprises competing for market share and looking to improve customer satisfaction ratings, having the ability to use multimodal applications to enable self-service for mobile device users will be a differentiator, said Daniel Hong, lead analyst at Datamonitor. "When looking at the evolution of phone-based self-service technologies, it began with touch-tone, progressed to include speech, and now the next phrase: multimodal enablement. This next stage in the evolution of phone-based self-service includes personalization and takes into account the proliferation of mobile devices."

This latest version of IVP provides immediate and universal access to the exploding audience of mobile device users. Interaction Composer is an Eclipse-based integrated development Environment (IDE) for building, deploying, and managing robust applications with drag-and-drop components and extensibility framework that enable both call center programmers and IT developers to quickly develop complex voice or multimodal applications. Interaction Composer enables the development of applications that allow callers to perform tasks simultaneously or interrupt tasks with new requests, and then resume tasks where they left off. Interaction Composer application runtime leverages the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specification for State Chart eXtensible Markup Language (SCXML). Intervoice uses SCXML as an extended application notation that enables combining call control functionality with voice interactions and mobile phone screen pops, as well as other types of message-oriented interactions such as SMS, to provide an information-rich, multichannel and multimodal contact center experience for the caller. For enterprises with legacy IVR applications, Interaction Composer also enables the migration of legacy IVR applications to open-standards applications that can include a speech option for more efficient self-service calls.  Interaction Composer allows developers to move easily to the IVP platform by greatly reducing the risk and costs that can normally be associated when upgrading technology.

With IVP 6, clients can also create highly personalized applications by leveraging Convergys Dynamic Decisioning Solution, a software product that includes both a set of tools and a policy engine. When building a speech application with IVP, developers can create a set of policies or rules that can trigger personalized interactions for end users based on existing customer data. The use of Dynamic Decisioning Solution with IVP brings an enhanced level of customer service by enabling applications to automatically respond to changes in a customer’s profile in real time improving each customer's self-service experience. The combination of these products enables enterprises to reduce time to market and costs associated with deploying personalized self-service applications.

Intervoice Voice Portal 6.0 is offered in three solution packages to meet diverse business-needs: Voice Portal Express, Voice Portal Enterprise, and Voice Portal Enterprise Pro. Convergys Dynamic Decisioning Solution is available as an add-on component to either Enterprise or Enterprise Pro for enhanced personalization and policy management.

Intervoice Voice Portal Enterprise Pro includes Interaction Composer and the outbound notification capabilities of Advanced Notification Gateway. First introduced with IVP 5.0, Advanced Notification Gateway (ANG) is typically leveraged as a solution to reduce calls to the contact center.  The primary mechanism for sending SMS, email, fax, and initiating outbound voice calls within the IVP framework, ANG enables end-users to receive real-time, outbound communications.  Originating from a self-service application, this solution proactively alerts end-users to important updates, issues, and other information.  

The  Intervoice Voice Portal platform has a standard-based web-inspired architecture including server-side (SCXML engine) and client-side (voice and call control browsers) components, that can be deployed on a single server or in a distributed configuration.  This type of architecture provides the ability to quickly and consistently roll out new classes of software applications. The highly scalable and highly available IVP platform includes support for Nuance 9 and Nuance Verifier 4 as well as support for IBM Websphere Voice Server (WVS) with Speaker Verification (SV). Enterprises will have more choices to meet the growing demand for adding speech to existing applications, for developing new speech-enabled applications, and for adding voice or multi-factor authentication solutions.  Callers will have more efficient interactions due to higher accuracy and the enablement of more natural conversations.

Clients can order IVP 6 starting December 1.