Message Technologies, a vendor of speech-enabled interactive voice response (IVR
) and hosting products for speech applications, has announced that it has been selected by Mediu to provide IVR hosting and co-location services for the company's retail store locator and customer loyalty speech technology applications.
"We did a great deal of research before we selected MTI to host our applications," said Mike Berichon, CEO of Mediu. "MTI was chosen because of their many years of hosting experience, the quality of their technology and because they're flexible and easy to work with."
One of Mediu's retail customers, a shoe retailer, has them run a customer loyalty programs. The retailer incorporates hosted speech-enabled IVR into their loyalty program by enabling customers to check reward points, manage their account and apply points immediately to their next purchase all using a phone number identification call-in system.
Mediu estimates speech technology applications for customer loyalty can increase revenue by 18 percent and save retailers on call center operations costs for like transactions using live agents.
Mediu's store locator enhances the customer experience for one of the nation's leading off-price retailers. The application lets callers answer questions about zip codes and other geographic information to immediately locate the closet retail location and obtain store hours. Mediu estimates that store locator speech technology can provide call center savings in the range of 80 percent per year for retailers.
Last year Message announced the expansion of its Sales and Marketing team with the addition of three executives. Rory Couch joined MTI as the Regional Sales Director, Khalid Qadir as the Sales Engineer and Erich Hermanns as the Director of Marketing.
As Regional Sales Director, Couch is responsible for driving sales in the speech automation hosting and application development sector. Prior to joining MTI, Couch served as Manager of National Account Sales for Nortel Networks.
Qadir is responsible for technically supporting the sales team in both pre- and post-sales engagements. He has over eight years of experience in the customer relationship management (CRM) industry, specializing in speech automation, IVR systems and computer telephony integration
.
Hermanns is responsible for developing and implementing the corporate marketing strategy. He comes to Message from his last job as Senior Manager of Marketing Communications with BellSouth Corporation.
Last summer Message Technologies added VoIP
capability for its more than 2,000 clients.
"Now that VoIP has progressed to being technologically stable and economically advantageous, MTI is pleased to offer our clients this industry-leading option. VoIP presents the benefits of extended functionality, greater outsourcing choices and significant cost savings," said Darrell Knight, President of MTI.
VoIP offers "virtually identical, comparable quality of service
and sound quality as time division multiplexing" with "other substantial advantages," Message officials said.
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David Sims is a contributing editor for ContactCenterSolutions. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.