Dollar Rent A Car Receives ScanSoft's Milestone Achievement Award

PEABODY, MA - ScanSoft Inc. (Nasdaq: SSFT) recognized Dollar Rent A Car, a subsidiary of Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group Inc. (NYSE: DTG), with a Milestone Achievement Award for reaching a critical customer service milestone with their speech solution. Since its implementation, Dollar has served eight million customers through its automated customer service personalities "SARA" (Speech Activated Reservations Agent) and "DEE" (derived from DTAG "Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group"). ScanSoft's Milestone Achievement Award is designed to recognize companies who have achieved significant financial returns from ScanSoft speech recognition deployments. Winners are required to have fully deployed systems for at least 12 months and documented financial targets and results. Milestone drivers include substantial cost savings as a result of increased automation, improved productivity that results in new revenues or substantial customer satisfaction gains. ScanSoft presented the Milestone Achievement Award to Dollar Rent A Car at Conversations 2003, ScanSoft's annual speech conference. "At Dollar we are committed to making our customer interactions both high tech and high touch," said Janet Worley, staff vice-president of customer sales and service at Dollar. "ScanSoft worked closely with our internal technology team to create both Dee and Sarah. The results have been impressive as we've generated millions of dollars in new revenues and been able to efficiently serve more than 8 million customers." Dollar Rent A Car's top-line goal in introducing both SARA and DEE was to reduce customer call time from 150 seconds to 125 seconds. In May 2003, Dollar achieved this milestone and then proceeded to take full advantage of the timesavings to train their live "agents" to become even more sales oriented. As a result, SARA and DEE have contributed to a 1.4 percent increase in Dollar's annual conversion rate, providing Dollar with several million dollars in additional revenue. "We are honored to recognize Dollar with this milestone achievement award and pleased that Dollar's customers and telephone sales representatives have responded so positively to SARA and DEE," said Steve Chambers, senior vice president and general manager of Network Speech Solutions at ScanSoft. "Dollar Rent A Car is a great example of how speech technology can be used to not only streamline internal processes and improve productivity, but also play a significant role in building new revenue."