Nectar is expanding the software-as-a-service, or “SaaS (News - Alert),” cloud telephony offerings as a way to enhance its management portfolio. Juma Technology and Tellme, part of Microsoft (News - Alert) Corp., announced a strategic alliance to deliver speech self-service on Tellme's on-demand platform.
The Tellme service is an addition to the managed services portfolio of Juma's software subsidiary, Nectar (News - Alert) Services Corp. With Tellme. Nectar's global channel partner community will have the ability to bring these on-demand speech self-service solutions to market.
According to Martin Cusack, vice president of Contact Center Solutions for Juma, the company will utilize Tellme’s on-demand speech services to boost overall moral of customers and partners.
“The alliance with Tellme, Microsoft's on-demand speech platform, gives us the ability to deliver a unified customer service experience across an enterprise with speech self-service,” Cusack said. “The market is demanding both cost savings and a higher quality user experience, and with Tellme we are able to deliver on all fronts.”
Barry Russell, Director of Tellme enterprise partners at Microsoft said,
“Improving customer service while controlling costs are two major imperatives for businesses today,” said Barry Russell, director of Tellme enterprise partners at Microsoft. “By taking advantage of the power of Tellme's platform, Juma will deliver speech self-service with advanced routing solutions running in the cloud. This will better enable business to control costs and deliver a more robust experience to their customers.”
Juma’s CEO Anthony Servidio, said that the alliance will position itself in a powerful stance in the market
“Both Tellme and Nectar have extremely solid, cloud-based solutions. Together, we will undoubtedly accelerate speech self-service adoption not only in the enterprise, but throughout the midmarket as well,” Servidio said.
By utilizing Tellme's on-demand speech platform, Nectar's partners and enterprise customers will have another avenue to drive significant cost savings and provide a higher level of service to their callers.
The Nectar SaaS Contact Center and IVR solution, running on the Tellme platform, enables both large and mid-sized businesses to take advantage of self-service speech applications to improve customer service and enhance the overall caller experience.
Premise-based IVR and speech recognition services are often expensive to purchase, complicated to deploy and require dedicated a maintenance staff. The new alliance between Juma and Tellme brings to market an expanded yet affordable call automation service via the on-demand model, making it cost effective for businesses of all sizes to take advantage of speech recognition and call automation technologies.
Tellme is the world's largest on-demand VoiceXML (News - Alert) platform for phone self-service applications. The Tellme platform handles billions of calls every year, providing carrier-grade reliability, best-of-breed speech technologies and flexible capacity for call traffic spikes that make it easier for customers to manage IVR costs.
In other cloud telephony news, cloud telephony provider Ifbyphone (News - Alert) recently announced that Saint Jude Retreats, an alternative addiction recovery program, after using Ifbyphone’s call tracking platform, increased telephone inquiries from website visitors by 42 percent.
Hans Lewis is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by Kelly McGuire