Industry Overview

Increasing competitiveness amongst the telcos is driving the rapid and innovative delivery of new services that require flexible, dynamic change in presentation and communication, along with asset protection of applications and resources to reduce ongoing costs. These issues can be addressed and delivered through the use of Vicorp’s xMP Service Creation Environment Tools and its newest product – xPress™.

One of the biggest issues facing telecoms operators is to identify and deploy efficient and cost effective ways of keeping consumer ‘churn’ at minimum level, while creating interest and winning customers from their competitors. Voice communication is still the single biggest channel for conducting business and as a general rule, telcos have some of the largest Contact Centres. Any new approach that can improve customers’ experience while delivering efficiency gains is therefore worthy of their serious consideration.

The problem

Although the acceleration in numbers of subscribers switching to alternative operators has begun to slow (based on a recent European Electronic Communications Regulation and Markets Report), this is possibly the result of win-back campaigns by operators. The increasing attractiveness of bundles of services (such as voice, internet, content and television) being offered by telcos in order to keep existing customers is a further possible factor.

But considerable challenges remain. The world is, for example, literally full of telco operators that use Interactive Voice Response (IVR). These services are most frequently encountered in call centres: many of them have also now been around for a long time and are starting to show their age. Despite the technology now available, even changing a simple voice prompt can take several weeks: hardly helpful in an environment where maintaining competitive edge is so vital.

Telcos have a wider range of products to sell across longer hours of business – in many cases, this now means providing a service 24x7. The consumer market is driving changes in communication habits: most of us now expect to be able to chase up an enquiry, or to respond to an advertisement, outside what were once ‘traditional’ working hours.

Simultaneously, service providers have been forced to reduce operational costs as fierce competition and deregulation have eroded margins on traditional voice and data transactions; customers increasingly expect many basic services to be provided either free of charge or at low cost.

In response, telcos are increasingly moving call centre operations offshore, taking advantage of cheaper labour markets to reduce operating costs and handle higher call volumes - despite evidence of a decrease in customer satisfaction and a corresponding increase in customer churn. (To gauge the depth of consumer feeling on this issue, take a brief look at www.gethuman.com)

This all begs the question as to why telcos would not look seriously at developing practical, flexible and easily managed speech-enabled services that could be localised into natural language and which would circumvent the need to deploy more live agents to address the increasing work load.

The way forward

We are now in a changing technical environment where a combination of new technologies and protocols not only allow new capabilities to be deployed, but also create new markets for new types of software and solution vendors.

The combination of all these factors is driving an increasing need for telcos to automate and improve business transactions over the telephone, while realising the potential of their existing corporate assets (eg telephony, web, existing CRM systems and agents).

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), enterprises can see a dramatic return on investment.

Today, voice services can be built separately from their underlying platform infrastructure – and can remain abstracted from it, meaning that services can be altered at will without fear of system reconfiguration or downtime.

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. The ability to dynamically change client interaction and present pertinent information ‘on-the-fly’ is also now a reality.

In fact – just like the web - the speech application world is no longer the sole domain of technical specialists. Advanced solutions can be designed to be managed directly by the businesses that use them. This in turn means that their customers can experience up to date messages and get to their business destination quicker – and help themselves to an ever increasing degree: ‘self-service’ can now be a reality rather than an aspiration.

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 telcos 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 solution: 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.