Alliant Energy Enhances Customer Service Portfolio With Edify's Speech Automation Capabilities

SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Alliant Energy announced that it has deployed Edify Corporation's speech-enabled software to provide Alliant Energy a self-service offering for its growing customer base in the heartland of America.

Investor-based Alliant Energy serves more than 1.4 million customers in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin and covers a service territory of 54,000 miles that includes 9,700 miles of electric transmission lines and 8,000 square miles of natural gas main.  Together with Viecore, Inc., Edify provided Alliant Energy with a call center offering driven by speech automation.  Based on Edify's platform and speech solutions, Alliant Energy is currently providing its customer base with self-service access to bill payment information, new customer enrollment, change-of-address capabilities, power outage reports and more by speaking their requests.  Their customers are now directed to the appropriate menu based on their request and are able to fulfill their needs through automated speech self-service.

"The Utilities landscape is changing as more and more organizations are placing customer service at the top of their business strategies," said Roger Saldia, project manager, CSI Web and IVR Program at Alliant Energy. "Based on Edify's knowledge of our markets and the level of service we wanted to provide, Edify is the only company that we could rely on to help us enhance our customer service offering through speech automation."

Saldia continues to say, "Due to the scalability of the Edify solution, we were able to customize our speech-enabled applications to meet our immediate business needs and aggressive project timeline.  Edify's expertise in developing and promoting open and non-proprietary technologies ensures our investment will support our business plans well into the future."