Another Gannett COE Goes Live with VoicePort

Gannett has begun deployment of VoicePort’s CircPort, an interactive voice response (IVR) system specifically designed for newspaper and magazine circulation inquiries, at its newest Center of Excellence (COE) in Tulsa, Okla. The new Tulsa facility, the third Gannett operation to deploy the solution, serves 25 of Gannett’s daily newspapers and is expected to handle 6.5 million calls annually.

As papers are transitioned to the new center, subscribers to the 25 newspapers will be able to self-service their accounts, accessing the Gannett proprietary circulation database in real time to conduct transactions. Callers will be able to place or release temporary delivery holds, report delivery issues, and check the status of their accounts. Additional functionality, such as the ability for customers to make payments, start new subscriptions, or change their addresses, is planned in the second phase of the CircPort deployment.

"VoicePort has been organized and managed the deployment process very well," said Jeff Gillen, director of the Gannett COE. "VoicePort stepped up to the challenges of relating to our unique business rules and the needs of the individual papers."

VoicePort currently supplies advanced speech recognition applications to more than 120 top daily newspapers in North America. The CircPort application is offered in both on-premises and hosted models and fully integrates with major industry and proprietary circulation databases.  CircPort’s suite of custom and configurable circulation applications also includes WebPort, a Web portal that can handle all the same functions as CircPort, and Dispatch, a call routing, complaint resolution, and tracking solution.