SoundBite Communications Releases SoundBite 6.0 to Accelerate the Creation of Powerful Automated Customer Contact Solutions; Enhancements to the Award-Winning Automated Voice Messaging Solution Dramatically Improve Outbound Customer Contact Campaigns

Business Wire, Sept 12, 2006

BURLINGTON, Mass. -- SoundBite Communications Inc., a leading provider of hosted, automated customer contact solutions, today launched version 6.0 of the award-winning SoundBite automated voice messaging solution. The new release adds significant enhancements that dramatically increase the ability to create, manage and execute highly effective, automated voice messaging campaigns.

More than 250 organizations in the collections, financial services, telecommunications, retail, publishing, media, healthcare and utility industries rely on SoundBite's proven automated voice messaging solution to proactively communicate with their customers. In 2005 alone, the SoundBite hosted solution successfully made more than 500 million call attempts and delivered 200 million messages ranging from credit card activation reminders, to special in-store promotions, to payment requests.

"With the automated voice messaging business topping $360 million in 2005, SoundBite is poised to take the leadership position in a highly fragmented market," said Walt Tetschner, Principal of market research firm Tern Systems and author of the 2006 Outbound Call Processing report. "SoundBite's new release, along with their more than 10 million daily call capacity and broad industry experience, puts SoundBite in a very strong position."

New Features in SoundBite 6.0

SoundBite 6.0 brings a higher level of sophistication to automated voice messaging solutions with new features including Enterprise Manager, Campaign Strategy Manager, Call Forecasting, and an improved user interface. Combined, these bold, new features accelerate an organization's ability to achieve their customer communications objectives and build strong customer relationships.

Enterprise Manager

SoundBite 6.0 is the only solution of its kind to give users real-time visibility into customer campaigns across the entire enterprise from a single enterprise control panel. Companies with multiple call center locations gain significant benefit with Enterprise Manager since it provides a single view across call centers in disparate locations - whether down the street, across the country, or around the world. Enterprise Manager gives call center executives a unified view that they have not had before and provides them with the tools to share best practices, reduce duplicate efforts, and ensure compliance across their diverse and disparate call center and customer contact operations.

Enterprise Manager offers the following features to manage and share customer campaign components across related entities:

--Manage access to all campaigns within the enterprise and all related locations, and create user accounts and privileges for greater security;

--Create campaign templates that incorporate best practices that can be shared across the enterprise for a consistent brand experience and reduce redundant efforts across various call center teams;

--Easily load suppression lists just once that can then be shared across multiple locations to ensure compliance;

--Generate customized, summary level and detailed reports on campaign activity across the entire enterprise and ensure consistent reporting across multiple facilities;

--Easily access information on each time a phone number was called from any facility in the enterprise.

Campaign Strategy Manager

Campaign Strategy Manager is a new feature designed to increase an organization's ability to easily create, manage and launch proactive customer communication campaigns that yield superior business results. Campaign Strategy Manager introduces new features to the SoundBite platform to create powerful customer campaigns:

--Multi-Pass Campaigns: SoundBite 6.0 now offers a powerful configuration for linking together multiple, overlapping passes through a call list for a particular campaign. As a result, organizations can now create more efficient campaigns, and generate reports that analyze the impact of the entire campaign rather than just a single call pass. Organizations can also tailor individual call passes to increase call list penetration. Campaign Strategy Manager responds to each call attempt based on results of prior call passes, helping to eliminate redundant calls and maintain a positive customer experience.

--Call Pass Escalation: Organizations can now attempt to call different phone numbers for a contact to increase list penetration. Each call pass can specify its own rules for which contacts to attempt, and which phone number to use. Each client interaction can be tailored to behave differently based on the call pass or type of phone number, ensuring a high degree of personalization, increased call backs and right-party connections.

--Contact Ordering: SoundBite users now have the option to specify the order in which to call customers in a list. Different ordering strategies can be used to accomplish the desired outcome. For example, calls might be ordered such that higher value customers or those with certain credit scores or balances due are called first. Contact Ordering can also be used to call those customers most likely to respond depending on the time of day.