Industry Overview

The Leisure industry is a high growth area, which comprises the health and fitness, betting and gambling, and sports and recreation sectors. It is both extremely diverse and hugely competitive across its component sectors.

Apart from competitiveness, these sectors share another important characteristic: they are all increasingly looking to use speech technologies to reduce costs, increase product awareness and improve customer care. While all need to keep costs under control, they share similar pressures to retain their competitive edge while delivering innovative products and services in order to reduce customer ‘churn’ to a minimum.

The problem

Many leisure industry companies have half-heartedly either looked into or implemented speech-enabled applications, but usually without fully understanding the true capabilities of modern speech technologies.

Where they have not invested sufficient time or the money, they have consequently failed to achieve the results that they - and their customers - want. Worse still, where solutions have been implemented, many have had negative effects – inaction might have been preferable!

In fast-moving industries with frequent changes to service and product offerings, the time and cost traditionally associated with the ‘tuning’ of applications has represented a further barrier to success. Leisure industry companies want – and need - to be able to make regular changes, at a moment’s notice and at low cost. In such a competitive environment, service and product modification is a constant reality, and waiting weeks for a simple change to be implemented by a service developer or host loses valuable edge over competitors.

So, how can they achieve high quality speech applications that run on a highly available, reliable an vendor-independent runtime platform, and which are so easy to manage that anyone can make simple application changes without risking business critical services?

The way forward

Today’s speech technologies have come a long way since those of the mid-1990s, delivering ever-increasing levels of speed and accuracy. It is now entirely reasonable to expect a high quality, well designed and finely tuned system to achieve accuracy levels of 95% and above.

The accompanying industry push towards open standards also means that realising the reuse of existing corporate assets (such as the telephony, web, existing CRM systems and agents) is no longer an aspiration: the tools are now available to make this very much a reality.

The latest tools mean that services can now be built in a fraction of the time previously experienced: a new service can be built and tested in a matter of days rather than months, and redesigned many times until it works exactly as it should. Indeed, many can be constructed from base software components that can be reused at will.

Just like the web, the tools now exist to enable non-technical staff to rapidly manage and adapt services in response to changing markets or to product and service portfolio re-positioning. A leisure centre manager, for example, no longer needs to consult a speech application expert to implement a change in a voice prompt – day-to-day changes can be made ‘on-the-fly’ from the desktop.

This is the market in which Vicorp operates. Our vision is to provide a complete self service offering, by providing software tooling and application components that enable companies to manage every aspect of consumer fulfilment through the use of the telephone and other interactive communication channels. By incrementally automating existing agent-based transactions through speech (so called ‘self-service’ applications), companies can see a dramatic return on investment.

Vicorp xPress™ speech solutions

xPress™ addresses the issues of intelligently managing a client and providing pertinent information in any format at the right time and place, enabling organisations to build a relationship whose qualities are experienced each time a client makes contact.

Vicorp deliver an end-to-end solution that enables organisations to address their voice services in a complete manner. Vicorp also works with a number of partners across the globe to deliver the same level of quality worldwide.

Vicorp uses its own highly advanced development tools and platforms to deliver voice services and solutions: its xMP product suite is the leading independent Service Creation environment available in the market.

Vicorp provides all the tools and a runtime framework for assembling, deploying, delivering and managing dynamic communication services. Single and multi-channel application environments are available that strongly support Service Creation, reuse, development and extension by non-technical people. Vicorp also builds sample services, prototypes, proof of concept services and full production services to any scale, running on any infrastructure.