Synchronoss Acquires SpeechCycle

Synchronoss, a provider of on-demand multichannel transaction management solutions to the communications services sector, has quietly acquired SpeechCycle. The companies did not make a formal announcement, except to mention the acquisition during Synchronoss' first quarter 2012 earnings conference call with analysts.

During the conference call, Stephen Waldis, chairman, president, and CEO of Synchronoss, said the company sought to add additional voice technology to automate complex voice transactions and provide it with a more complete offering in overall higher automation rates. "When handling transactions within customer service and care channels, a very high amount of these transactions are voice related. Many of these transactions cannot be automated in our traditional offerings," he said.

"SpeechCycle's natural language speech recognition technology is specifically tuned for the service provider environment and the types of transactions that we are handling," Waldis said. "SpeechCycle enables self-service resolution for many calls, and when a human element is required their technology enables the handle time to be dramatically reduced.

"SpeechCycle's technology has been tested with customers such as Charter, Cablevision, and Telstra, an Australian company, and we plan to move to deploy the technology within this new care channel at AT&T in 2012. This will enable Synchronoss and [partner company] AT&T to achieve our target automation rates and improve the overall customer experience more quickly than we had initially contemplated,” he continued.

Synchronoss has not commented on the acquisition, and SpeechCycle issued a statement, saying, "We are very much looking forward to being a part of such an innovative company."