American Savings Bank Deployed Speech-enabled Banking Application from Intervoice

/>DALLAS , Tex. - Intervoice, Inc. (Nasdaq: INTV) announced that American Savings Bank, one of Hawaii 's largest financial institutions, deployed a speech-enabled banking application designed by Intervoice. American Savings Bank has been an Intervoice customer since 2001 and is further increasing caller satisfaction and extending self-service offerings with the OmviaÒ Voice Framework deployed within a Cisco IP environment. The project was completed and fully deployed in the first quarter of the Company's fiscal year, which ends February 28, 2005.

 

The key to creating a speech-enabled system that encourages customer utilization is to test speech-enabled applications with actual end users. Intervoice conducted research to understand the customer service goals of American Savings Bank. While other voice automation providers use pre-developed applications, Intervoice develops and refines applications based on the interactions of real users. Usability testing conducted by Intervoice in Hawaii was a process that looked at who their customer base is comprised of, what goals were defined, what the existing application offers, how to better streamline common inquiries, in order to ensure optimal success and use by customers. As a result, the dual-system configuration initially handled over 340,000 calls during June 2004.

 

"The newly deployed speech-enabled application from Intervoice is a really convenient option for customers to do telebanking," said Renee Lum, AVP/Manager of American Savings Bank's Customer Service Center .

 

"Customers like the new application - it's something fun and new. Usability testing was paramount in ensuring that customers would use the automated system and it has been very successful thus far. We want our customers to use this application as it's available on a 24/7 basis and is a cost effective and efficient way of providing them with information," added Lum.

 

The application deployed at American Savings Bank uses a local female voice talent that greets callers with a regional dialect and salutations such as 'Aloha' and 'Mahalo' in order to project a local image.