Nuance targets marketers, carriers with mobile customer care services
April 11, 2008
Lynda Kate Smith is vice president and general manager of the enterprise division's care business at Nuance Communications
Seventy percent of calls to call centers by 2010 will be handled over mobile phones, according to research from Celent. That’s the market that customer care specialist Nuance Communications is targeting.
The company is targeting enterprises and wireless carriers with a suite of products that leverage mobile devices to improve customer care automation.
“Nuance’s mission is to provide businesses that serve the world’s increasingly mobile consumers with solutions that deliver self-service experiences, enabling people everywhere to seamlessly get help, make purchases and save time,” said Lynda Kate Smith, vice president and general manager of the enterprise division’s care business at Nuance, Sunnyvale, CA.
Nuance’s speech-enabled customer care offerings allow companies to send SMS confirmations following completed transactions.
Per Harris Interactive, more than 80 percent off people who call customer care after completing a transaction do it to make sure the transaction was really done. So, sending an SMS message cuts the need for that follow-up call and also saves costs for the company, Ms. Smith said.
Another service that Nuance offers is Intelligent Offer Management, which is designed to change care transactions into one-on-one marketing opportunities. Firms can use IVR and SMS real estate to upsell products and services. Nuance claims to upsell more than 150,000 features a month.
Nuance is vying for carrier business with a new service it is creating called Nuance Mobile Care.
The idea behind this product is to deliver intuitive customer care for all mobile phones. Carriers can offer a branded and personalized experience, improve customer satisfaction and cut costs with better self-service opportunities.
Nuance Mobile Care is said to be built from the ground up to work in a customer care environment. It can connect to billing, payment processing and call center systems to boost higher completion rates. It can also transfer to an agent accompanied with context information via computer telephony integration.
This again is designed to cut costs in call center operations with higher automation rates, according to Nuance.
“Because no change is required, the application is positioned to achieve mass-adoption,” Ms. Smith said.
The rap on WAP
Enterprises and carriers have tried to use mobile customer care in many forms. The most common attempt currently is using WAP to drive Web-like customer care on the handset.
But several factors reduce the viability of WAP as a platform for customer care, Ms. Smith claimed.
“It usually requires several clicks to access the care functions and anything on the handset that is more than one to two clicks away essentially does not exist from the user perspective,” Ms. Smith said.
“In addition, WAP and wireless Web in their current incarnation are primarily suitable to get information,” she said, “but less so to perform care transactions that require several steps due to latencies in navigation.”
Nuance is working on several products, but it is relying on its speech and text input offerings to expand the mobile care platform business.
“We envision a solution that will allow people to effortlessly get help on the handset via any channel, whether dialing, texting or the most natural input mechanism, speech,” Ms. Smith said.
About half of the world’s population uses mobile phones, presenting both an opportunity and a challenge to marketers and carriers.
“The challenges, which we view as opportunities, relate to the cost of serving these consumers and the level of service provided,” Ms. Smith said.
For example, marketers in the United States spend more than $100 billion each year in care agents, while carriers alone spend more than $7 billion to serve their customers.
Research from J.D. Powers shows that consumers spend, on average, 3 minutes in wait time to talk to agents.
“We believe there is a huge opportunity to improve self-service rates with compelling solutions that leverage the increasing capabilities of networks and devices,” Ms. Smith said.
“To give a sense of the magnitude of the opportunity, by improving self-service rates just 1 percent, wireless carriers can save over $100 million per year,” she said.