This first stage is for organisations that are seeking a speech self-service solution but want to understand which call types should be automated and what the associated benefits might be.

Many organisations have come to a critical watershed with their self-service strategy: existing IVR platforms are out of date, out of support and are now struggling to respond to the changing needs of the business and its customers. Even for those organisations that are not facing specific ‘end-of-life’ or support issues, the increased pace of deployment of ‘next generation’ IVR means competitors are improving their customer service in ways that legacy systems cannot keep up with.

Is voice self-service a key part of your customer relationship strategy? If yes, it must be designed with your customers, business drivers and processes in mind. Vicorp's approach is to understand our customer's business issues fully and once armed with this crucial data we can determine when and where the journey for voice self-service starts and finishes. Through delivery of defined work packages we will identify and define the business applications that should be targeted for automation and the infrastructure that will be required to deliver on these applications.

Once an organisation has decided to go ahead with Speech they may need assistance in designing, implementing and deploying the solution. A successful project relies on stakeholders, designers and system integrators having an effective working relationship based upon trust and an awareness of the complexities involved in Speech.

Once a solution has gone live an organisation may make changes relating to company strategy, product offering, system hardware, business logic, or self-service applications; in addition customer needs and behaviour alter over time. This will all have an impact on the solution performance.