Poll and Profit: Nuance FASt™ Caller Survey Helps Companies Improve Services, Retain Customers; New Application Template Enables Rapid Deployment of Voice-Enabled Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Business Wire, July 28, 2005

MENLO PARK, Calif. -- A Harvard Business Review study reveals that phone-based satisfaction surveys can increase customer profitability. For instance, a year after being surveyed, customers at a leading insurance company were 300 percent more likely to open new accounts, and more than 50 percent less likely to switch to a competitor. To help organizations leverage this phenomenon, Nuance (Nasdaq:NUAN), the voice automation expert, today announced a new member of its Nuance Flexible Application Suite (Nuance FASt(TM)) - the Nuance FASt Caller Survey. This solution accelerator includes application templates and services designed to help companies rapidly deploy voice-enabled customer satisfaction surveys.

"Monitoring customer satisfaction levels is a vital part of understanding how callers view the customer experience, assessing the performance of the systems and agents, and pinpointing appropriate changes," said Lynda Smith, Nuance's chief marketing officer. "With the Nuance FASt Caller Survey, companies can more easily deploy these solutions and take advantage of the intelligence that polling provides."

Targeted at the financial services, insurance, health-care, retail, and telecommunications industries, a Nuance FASt Caller Survey presents callers with five directed questions and one open-ended question. Questions can be selected from a pre-built list, or they can be customized to refer to a specific service or for any other purpose. The five directed questions elicit spoken responses on a simplified four-point scale (yes, somewhat, not really, no), which is ideal for establishing a statistically consistent empirical baseline measure of customer satisfaction. The open-ended question captures valuable spoken responses on any topic.

Nuance FASt Caller Survey automatically generates both summary and customizable detailed reports in real-time, which users can access over the web anytime, anyplace. Nuance FASt Caller Survey can be used as a standalone application with any speech, touchtone IVR, or agent queue system, or can be easily added to any voice automation solution based on the Nuance Voice Platform.

Nuance FASt Caller Survey is available now. Pricing is available on request.

About Nuance

In an era where a focus on the customer is essential to business success, Nuance provides leading companies with voice-automation solutions that enable both an outstanding customer experience and corporate cost efficiency. Nuance is a leader in the voice automation market, providing software and solutions to more than 1,000 companies worldwide. Clients include Avon, British Airways, Nomura Securities, OnStar, Sprint PCS, United Parcel Service, Vodafone and Wells Fargo. Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN) is headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif., and has offices around the world. For more information, visit www.nuance.com or call 1-888-NUANCE-8.

This press release contains forward-looking statements with respect to Nuance, including, for example, those relating to the business and customer benefits attainable by using the Nuance FASt Caller Survey. There is no assurance that the results contemplated by any such forward-looking statements will be realized. The following factors, risks and uncertainties, among others, could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by such forward-looking statements: the risk that the Nuance FASt Caller Survey will not result in customer retention or allow customers to rapidly and easily deploy surveys, and other factors described in Nuance's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including but not limited to Nuance's last-filed Form 10-Q. Nuance does not undertake to update any oral or written forward-looking statements that may be made by or on behalf of Nuance.

Nuance is a registered trademark, and Nuance FASt is a trademark, of Nuance Communications, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.