TeliaSonera Deploys Call Steering from Nuance

BURLINGTON, Mass. - TeliaSonera, a telecommunications company in the Nordic and Baltic region, signed a deal with Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) to deliver call steering services to callers in the Nordics. Call Steering, a call routing solution, provides speech-based call routing for the operators' customer base in Sweden.

Call Steering allows TeliaSonera's residential customers to describe their needs in their own words and move to the relevant call center destination. TeliaSonera's cyber agent greets callers by saying, "Welcome to Telia. Please say in your own words what you'd like to do, and I'll direct your call to the right place. So, how can I help you?"

The company's residential customers in Sweden can access the service by calling 90200. TeliaSonera is also offering this solution to its enterprise customers as a hosted or CPE solution.

"The solution from Nuance is excellent at resolving customer queries. We based the roll out on a preliminary evaluation of more than one thousand customers which saw a 67 percent preference for the speech-enabled solution compared to 15 percent preferring touchtone. That's quite a shift in attitude for callers," said Anders Gylder, senior vice president, Customer Care Unit, TeliaSonera Sweden. "The mix of automated routing with natural speech ensures the caller is receiving the optimum service from our call center. Our goal is to optimize our operational performance while maximising the customer experience, and we recognized that speech technology is key to pushing us firmly in the right direction."

Nuance's Professional Services division worked with TeliaSonera Customer Integrated Solutions and Envox to deliver TeliaSonera's solution. This implementation was undertaken in two phases: involving a first live deployment in June 2006 in a limited geographical area in Sweden (to collect more service data, tune the system and start the evaluation process), and then the national roll out in November 2006.