Carlson Leisure Travel Services Selects Fluency Voice Technology to Deploy Enterprise Speech Recognition Applications

LONDON and NEW YORK - Carlson Leisure Travel Services (CLTS), a division of Carlson Leisure Group (CLG), has deployed a Fluency speech recognition IVR application.  This enables CLTS to automate its call center while managing the system internally.

With the implementation of the Fluency solution, customer callers are now able to communicate their travel requirements by speaking naturally to a virtual agent.  The system then routes calls to the appropriate live agent or continues to converse with the caller to carry out the more common transactions.

"Our call center is critical to everything we do," said Mark Steinweg, general manager at CLTS.  "Much of our business is conducted over the telephone so it is vital that caller satisfaction remain high.  Fluency has provided us with an expedient solution that matches our needs so that we can continue to provide an exceptional level of customer service, while at the same time controlling costs.  For us, the robustness of the Fluency speech application gives us the peace of mind that we can continue to grow by increasing customer bookings while providing our customers with the standard of service they have come to expect."

With Fluency's Identification and Verification with Status (IDVS) technology, that forms part of the Virtual Speech Agent (VSA) Suite™, CLTS's system can identify and verify callers before allowing them access to information such as points balance.  The system also gathers caller's travel itinerary requirements such as departure and arrival cities, dates and number of people traveling.  The Fluency system then utilizes a GDS travel reservation engine to retrieve available itineraries matching the caller's criteria.  Using Fluency's Prioritiser, also an application contained within the VSA Suite™, both the caller and their itinerary search results are promptly routed to the appropriate agent depending on the level of service the caller requires.
 
"We understand the additional value that speech can bring to an existing touch-tone IVR system in terms of customer self-service and wanted to upgrade our system to speech.  We chose Fluency because of their ability to rapidly deploy the solution, the projected ROI and their understanding of the challenges we face as a large travel services provider," added Steinweg.  "As a result of our favorable experience with Fluency, we are working with them to fulfill our call center needs in several more divisions of Carlson in the coming year."