South East Water Boosts Customer Choice with Speech Recognition from Fluency Voice

• Monday, 05 February 2007

- 50,000 South East Water customers have successfully paid their water bills with the new self service system since its marketing launch just six months ago-

London, February 5th, 2007 – Fluency Voice Technology, (www.fluencyvoice.com), the speech recognition application company, has today announced that South East Water has standardised on it speech solution to provide a self service payment line for its 600,000 customers. The system was first marketed during the 2006 annual billing exercise in March, and in the 9 months that followed, the service was used by nearly 10% of South East Water’s customers who are enjoying a high success rate with the automated bill payment service.

South East Water supplies 400 million litres of drinking water each day to 1.5 million people in the South East of England. Driven by a relentless focus on improving customer service, cutting call queues and enabling a 24 x 7 service, the South East Water team embarked on a project to enable its customers to pay their water bills over the phone using speech recognition.

Howard Handley is Director of Customer Services at South East Water and led the project to find a speech solution. “Our call centre provider knew Fluency and it quickly became clear that we shared a common vision to provide an intuitive true self service solution using speech recognition.” Howard continues, “We avoided touch tone technology as many of our customers pay using mobiles with hand held phones. Speech is a much more elegant and faster solution for this type of customer who can quickly complete the transaction without the need to enter numbers on a keypad.”

South East Water introduced the fully automated speech credit and debit card payment facility based on Fluency’s Virtual Speech Agent (VSA) Suite™ in March 2005 and without any marketing saw an impressive and increasing number of customers choosing to use the service. With a change in billing stationery in 2006, the service was actively promoted on the front of customer bills with a prominent 0800 phone number to promote the new way of paying. “Take up has been very positive,” notes Howard. “Previously our customers had the option to pay their bills by leaving a message on a self service message line but this was fraught with errors as there were frequent mistakes when details were subsequently manually transcribed. This led to a number of complaints.” Since the introduction of the new system, 50,000 customers have successfully paid their bills in 9 months using the Fluency speech recognition system and 60+% of customers make a successful transaction.

Looking to the future Howard and the team are now confident that speech recognition can be applied to other services such as setting up a direct debit, checking account balances, self meter reads and occupier changes. “These are all ideal applications for speech recognition as the volume of transactions is high but they take a short time to complete,” adds Howard. “Our customers have shown that they are comfortable with self service so it is a natural next stage to offer more services this way.”

Philip Padfield is CEO of Fluency Voice and adds, “In the last year alone we have seen the volume of calls handled by Fluency’s virtual agents soar to many millions as consumer confidence grows in using speech recognition technology to self serve for repeatable phone based tasks. We are delighted that South East Water has enjoyed such a successful take up of its automated payment service and we look forward to working with them to extend this success to other parts of their business.”

About Fluency Voice Technology

Fluency Voice Technology develops packaged speech recognition solutions that enable companies worldwide to improve customer service and significantly reduce costs.

Call centres rely on Fluency’s configurable Virtual Speech Agents (VSA) to automate many of their high volume repetitive tasks thereby freeing up agents to handle more complex queries and improve service levels as well as the overall performance of the business.

Fluency has offices in the UK and USA. For more information please visit, www.fluencyvoice.com

PR Contact:-

Carina Birt
PR for Fluency
Email: carina@sarumconsultancy.co.uk
Tel: +44 1722 411150

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