Implement efficient internal communications therefore providing better service to external customers.
Solution
Integrated leading edge technologies jointly with best-in-class partners to deliver a voice recognition automatic telephone attendant.
The Customer
The Telenor Business Solutions area develops and offers a broad range of application and communication solutions within telephony and data communications with a strong ability to combine the application and communication side, IT and IP.
Following analysis of their major customers’ switchboard usage, TBS revealed that as much as one-third of calls through the switchboard were from employees attempting to reach colleagues internally. TBS wanted to offer a service to get calls answered more efficiently, enabling the switchboard to provide a better service to external customers.
Voice Recognition Solution
In conjunction with Unisys, Telenor has developed an automatic telephone attendant to answer switchboard calls 24x7x365 based on any combination of factors such as name, surname, nickname, department or role. Unisys designed the solution to transfers calls to the right person or function even when the main switchboard is closed. Unisys integrated leading edge technologies jointly with best-in-class partners to deliver this service based on a voice recognition solution. Talk2Call(TM) enables companies to cut their associated switchboard costs by more than half.
Efficient Cost Saving Communications
Tom Fiksdalstrand, development manager for VIPcom, a division of Telenor Business Solutions, explains: “Unisys and Telenor have developed an automatic telephone attendant which answers internal switchboard calls 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Callers are greeted with a welcome message with the company name and asked who they want to talk to and the option of giving first name, last name, combination of first and last name or nickname as well as role and department. So even if the full details aren’t known, they can still reach the right person.”
The cost of routing a call through the automated attendant proved to be less than half the cost compared to using the manual switchboard. Fiksdalstrand goes on to say, “We did some research with our customers and compared the cost of transferring calls via a manual switchboard with the automatic attendant. Typically, it costs between five and ten Norwegian kroner (US$0.75 to US$1.50) to transfer calls manually. However, with the automated Telenor service it is only NOK 2 (US$0.30) – on average, cutting costs in half or more.”
Unisys Value Add – First to Market
Fiksdalstrand summarizes: “By working with Unisys, we have benefited from best-of-breed technology which minimizes risk and keeps costs down.” … “The Unisys contribution has been outstanding. Its consultants always demonstrated they were interested in working out any problems and doing a good job. We are looking forward to developing this partnership with Unisys further. Unisys has proved itself to be a good and solid partner during a long project.”
Fiksdalstrand continues: “We are the first to market in delivering this service in Norway. No one has done it before and it is a leading technology for us. However, we are expecting to see huge interest from customers and their customers.” Based on the success from the pilot customers, Telenor is now signing new customers on a daily basis.
Teamwork
Unisys was the prime contractor in the development of the automated attendant, providing systems integration for several technologies. With a number of partners involved in the solution, co-operative working was essential. Unisys and Telenor Business Solutions involved Aculab for the telephone network interface, Nuance for speech recognition and ScanSoft for speech synthesis. Natural Language processing technology and application development from the Unisys team was instrumental to the success of the project.
