SoundBite Communications Releases SoundBite 6.0 to Accelerate the Creation of Powerful Automated Customer Contact Solutions
Enhancements to the Award-Winning Automated Voice Messaging Solution Dramatically Improve Outbound Customer Contact Campaigns
BURLINGTON, Mass. – September 12, 2006 – SoundBite Communications Inc., a leading provider of hosted, automated customer contact solutions, today launched version 6.0 of the award-winning SoundBite automated voice messaging solution. The new release adds significant enhancements that dramatically increase the ability to create, manage and execute highly effective, automated voice messaging campaigns.
More than 250 organizations in the collections, financial services, telecommunications, retail, publishing, media, healthcare and utility industries rely on SoundBite’s proven automated voice messaging solution to proactively communicate with their customers. In 2005 alone, the SoundBite hosted solution successfully made more than 500 million call attempts and delivered 200 million messages ranging from credit card activation reminders, to special in-store promotions, to payment requests.
“With the automated voice messaging business topping $360 million in 2005, SoundBite is poised to take the leadership position in a highly fragmented market,” said Walt Tetschner, Principal of market research firm Tern Systems and author of the 2006 Outbound Call Processing report. “SoundBite’s new release, along with their more than ten million daily call capacity and broad industry experience, puts SoundBite in a very strong position.”
New Features in SoundBite 6.0
SoundBite 6.0 brings a higher level of sophistication to automated voice messaging solutions with new features including Enterprise Manager, Campaign Strategy Manager, Call Forecasting, and an improved user interface. Combined, these bold, new features accelerate an organization’s ability to achieve their customer communications objectives and build strong customer relationships.
Enterprise Manager
SoundBite 6.0 is the only solution of its kind to give users real-time visibility into customer campaigns across the entire enterprise from a single enterprise control panel. Companies with multiple call center locations gain significant benefit with Enterprise Manager since it provides a single view across call centers in disparate locations – whether down the street, across the country, or around the world. Enterprise Manager gives call center executives a unified view that they have not had before and provides them with the tools to share best practices, reduce duplicate efforts, and ensure compliance across their diverse and disparate call center and customer contact operations. Enterprise Manager offers the following features to manage and share customer campaign components across related entities:
- Manage access to all campaigns within the enterprise and all related locations, and create user accounts and privileges for greater security;
- Create campaign templates that incorporate best practices that can be shared across the enterprise for a consistent brand experience and reduce redundant efforts across various call center teams;
- Easily load suppression lists just once that can then be shared across multiple locations to ensure compliance;
- Generate customized, summary level and detailed reports on campaign activity across the entire enterprise and ensure consistent reporting across multiple facilities;
- Easily access information on each time a phone number was called from any facility in the enterprise.
Campaign Strategy Manager
Campaign Strategy Manager is a new feature designed to increase an organization’s ability to easily create, manage and launch proactive customer communication campaigns that yield superior business results. Campaign Strategy Manager introduces new features to the SoundBite platform to create powerful customer campaigns:
- Multi-Pass Campaigns: SoundBite 6.0 now offers a powerful configuration for linking together multiple, overlapping passes through a call list for a particular campaign. As a result, organizations can now create more efficient campaigns, and generate reports that analyze the impact of the entire campaign rather than just a single call pass. Organizations can also tailor individual call passes to increase call list penetration. Campaign Strategy Manager responds to each call attempt based on results of prior call passes, helping to eliminate redundant calls and maintain a positive customer experience.
- Call Pass Escalation: Organizations can now attempt to call different phone numbers for a contact to increase list penetration. Each call pass can specify its own rules for which contacts to attempt, and which phone number to use. Each client interaction can be tailored to behave differently based on the call pass or type of phone number, ensuring a high degree of personalization, increased call backs and right-party connections.
- Contact Ordering: SoundBite users now have the option to specify the order in which to call customers in a list. Different ordering strategies can be used to accomplish the desired outcome. For example, calls might be ordered such that higher value customers or those with certain credit scores or balances due are called first. Contact Ordering can also be used to call those customers most likely to respond depending on the time of day.
- Campaign Templates: With version 6.0, organizations can create their own customized templates that can be saved and later re-used for future automated voice messaging campaigns, or they can choose from a set of pre-packaged templates that incorporate best practices from the most commonly used campaign strategies. All of these templates are designed to accelerate campaign development and execution, reduce user error during campaign configuration, and deliver a consistent customer experience to ensure the highest levels of caller satisfaction and results.
Call Forecasting
With the ability to create more complex customer campaigns, SoundBite recognizes the value in being able to better predict and plan for fluctuations in call center volume. As a result, it is introducing Call Forecasting, which provides real-time hourly data on expected call volumes for each call pass and the campaign as a whole. Based on the Call Forecasting data, organizations can properly allocate call center resources to support the changing call volumes.
“SoundBite has enabled us to collect more debt in less amount of time, which has motivated our call center agents and made them much more productive,” said Mike Fascione, VP Operations, AllianceOne Toronto, a leading provider of accounts receivable management services. “New 6.0 features, such as call forecasting and contact ordering, will enable us to further prioritize our calling as well as optimize call center staffing, resulting in further increases in operational efficiencies.”
Improved User Interface
SoundBite 6.0 also features an improved user interface that provides immediate access to all components of the SoundBite solution. The new interface provides real-time, automatically updated status on active campaigns so that users can watch their campaigns progress.
“Our new release strengthens our leadership position in the fast-growing automated voice messaging market and builds upon our customer-proven solution,” said Peter Shields, president and CEO of SoundBite Communications. “SoundBite 6.0 enables organizations to more rapidly execute customer contact campaigns that deliver results – whether increasing revenues, or debt collected per agent, or proactively updating customers on a service issue. We focus our innovation on improving our clients’ campaign objectives while simultaneously creating a positive customer experience.”
Pricing and Availability
SoundBite 6.0 is available immediately under SoundBite’s standard pricing agreement and requires no on-premise hardware or software. Standard pricing is on a per minute basis and varies by call volume. SoundBite does not require any financial commitments – no monthly or annual minimums.
About SoundBite Communications
SoundBite Communications is a leading provider of automated customer contact solutions that are fully hosted and available on demand. The company’s solutions help organizations grow revenue, improve customer service, and secure payments through an efficient, reliable and cost-effective approach. SoundBite turns one-on-one customer contacts into results.
SoundBite’s highly personalized calling and messaging solutions, used for sales, marketing, customer care and collections applications, reach customers faster and more effectively than any other customer contact alternative. Over 250 world-class organizations use SoundBite’s solutions to deliver messages faster, increase call center productivity, improve results per customer contact and assess campaign results in real-time. Organizations across many industries use SoundBite including collections, financial services, retail, utilities, telecommunications, insurance, healthcare and media.
With over 500 million calls and 200 messages delivered in 2005, SoundBite has the best practices know-how, virtually unlimited, on-demand capacity, and robust campaign applications to deliver the customer communication results demanded in today’s competitive business environment.
SoundBite is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.SoundBite.com.