Auto attendant solutions provider Parlance Corporation is still drawing on lessons learned in its infancy.
In other words, everything I needed to know I learned as a young call routing vendor.
As a result, company officials say, the company has settled on a fully-managed service model while other vendors prefer the "do-it-yourself" model (with some offering a managed services option as a costly add-on).
In Parlance's first year, 1996, nameConnector service was also provided as a "do-it-yourself" service - an approach which was found to have "serious flaws and limitations," company officials now admit:
"It was determined through company-conducted primary research that any speech-enabled call routing must provide a connection rate greater than 85 percent in order to be successfully adopted by callers, the key to success for any call routing system," company officials say, adding that although this may sound like a perfectly reasonable target, "in reality, an 85 percent connection rate is extremely difficult to maintain on an ongoing basis."
Why? Change happens. Employees come and go, office assignments change, employees' names change -- in fact, Parlance research has determined that in most enterprise environments, up to 40 percent of directory entries can change annually. In other words, a 20,000 name directory will have as many as 8,000 entries change in only one year's time.
Hello performance degradation.
So Parlance decided to "partner with each and every customer and take full responsibility for system performance through a fully-managed service model," company officials recall.
Fully-managed services from Parlance - "more than just a speech tuning service," company officials maintain -- offers other benefits that make speech-enabled call routing truly turn-key, including "custom greetings and prompts for holidays and special occasions, hardware and software replacement for the life of the product and no mandatory upgrade fees."
So today, according to a recent white paper from Parlance, with nameConnector service "you only need to say the name to be connected to desk phones, conference rooms, cell phones and PDA devices, home phones, even teleconferences."
The "registry" of names and destinations also includes alternate pronunciations, nicknames, maiden and married names.
The company takes its 96 percent customer retention rate as a sign that they're taking the right approach.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David's articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Patrick Barnard