News

Vendors team to deliver speech-enabled customer service

May 29, 2003

LYNCHBURG, Va. -- Fortegra Inc. has joined forces with SandCherry Inc. to provide speech-enabled customer self-service and workforce management solutions. The first customers will be in the utility and energy industries.

The technology will allow users to conduct routine transactions such as starting, stopping and transferring of service; finding payment locations; requesting account updates; making payment arrangements; scheduling service personnel and reporting outages. Customers can interact using the Web or telephone.

Assisting customers with their transactions can improve customer satisfaction, and offloading routine transactions from call center staff can significantly reduce operating costs for businesses.

"Currently, many service-based companies build and maintain separate applications and integrations for call centers, phones and the Web to service customers. This redundancy substantially drives up the cost of building and maintaining applications, and increases complexity for adding new applications," said Kevin Chase, principal at Fortegra.

The partnership will combine Fortegra's customer-contact consulting and integration experience with SandCherry's SoftServer software platform. The SoftServer platform, an applications and media-resource broker, provides the ability for Web applications to access speech and telephony components for phone and multimodal (data and voice) users.