| ALAMEDA, Calif. - When the hospitality and travel industry made the call for better automated call center service, Voxify Inc. answered and its speech technology is starting to make noise.
Voxify makes automated call center systems. These systems feature electronic agents" with advanced conversational skills that can handle customer service calls.
These agents model the intelligence and personality of a trained live agent in dealing with customers, according to the company. The agents can perform a number of customer service functions such as reservations, sales and account information requests. Specific for the hospitality industry, the agents are able to greet guests, help locate hotel or flights, book reservations and update loyalty program information.
Speech recognition technology is at the heart of what Voxify does, but the goal is to no longer just satisfy a cost savings by replacing people with computers, said Amit Desai, Voxify co-founder and vice president of products. The aim is to make computers as efficient as people so that customers don't mind dealing with them.
"Speech recognition is not new," said Desai. "But that technology hasn't been mature enough or good enough in the past."
Voxify's agents take the process beyond simple functions and now make it so that customers can call in and complete the reservation process from start to finish - from choosing a hotel based on price and location to reserving the room to paying with a credit card.
"Obviously it is a sophisticated process," said Desai. "So it has to be really good in order to keep a human interested for seven minutes."
"You have to keep callers happy throughout the process," he added.
If an automated system is able to keep callers happy, which Desai believes Voxify's agents accomplish, the cost savings for the hotel make it a no-brainer.
When a human customer service rep answers a call it costs between $2.50 and $6 - Voxify's agents trim this number and cost between 25 cents to one dollar, according to Desai.
For hospitality companies, which field millions of calls per month, the savings adds up.
Voxify charges its customers between $25,000 to $50,000 to set up its automated agent system. Desai said the agents can be in place in about 8 weeks. After the system is set, Voxify charges a per-transaction fee.
"There is a return on investment on every call because you pay only for each call," said Desai. "Every call that comes in you are seeing enormous savings."
Another advantage that Desai sees with automated agents is that companies can ensure consistency of service in not having to continually train a high turnover of customer service representatives. The computer-based system can also handle a higher influx of calls, even if they all come in at once.
Lastly, Desai pointed out, Voxify's system can give companies insight on customer data and preferences because it can all be recorded.
Desai co-founded Voxify in 2001 with Adeeb Shanaa and Patrick Nguyen. Shanaa serves as chief executive officer and Nguyen is chief technology officer.
The three met each other through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Desai and Shanaa studied computer science and engineering at the school and Nguyen was a graduate business student. They also founded a business-intelligence software company in 1996 called Anubis, which they sold in 1999.
Voxify targeted the hospitality industry from the start.
"We thought hospitality was particularly attractive because it faces so much demand for customer service," Desai said. "We also thought the hospitality industry would be particularly receptive to new approaches."
"They want to serve their customers as best and fast as possible," he added.
Voxify has already found good success within the hospitality and travel industry. Customers include: WorldChoice Travel, Pegasus Solutions, Continental Airlines, CanJet Airlines and Canadian North Airlines.
The company has also signed a recent deal with Wyndham International Inc. The hotel giant operates approximately 145 hotels and resorts around the world with more than 36,000 rooms. Voxify will help automate 25 to 40 percent of the customer service calls through Wyndham's call centers - about 1 million calls, according to the company.
"We believe in giving our guests choices on how they want to be served," David Mussa, Wyndham's vice president of reservations, said in a statement about the deal with Voxify. "A large percentage of the calls we receive at our call center are common requests that can be easily and efficiently fulfilled by an intelligent automated agent. Offering our customers additional options in facilitating their requests, allows us to deliver a better guest experience - which is at the core of Wyndham's brand philosophy."
The Alameda, Calif.-based Voxify has 50 employees. The company is backed by El Dorado Ventures and Palomar Ventures.
Desai said that Voxify will continue to focus on the hospitality and travel industry, but is also branching into the retail industry where call centers handle functions such as order management, order status and catalogue orders, which can also be handled by automated agents.
A key to the company's early success has been that its products are an easy sell, according to Desai.
"Speech recognition is very easily demonstrated. You can give a number and tell them to call," he said. "It is easy for an executive to put themselves in the mind of an actual user and say, 'Yeah, I think my customers will like this.'"
"Even hardened executives, they see the point right away," he added. |
