Frost & Sullivan Recognizes Tellme For Excellence in Hosted Voice Self-Service Solutions to Large Volume Customers

Business Wire, Oct 24, 2007

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Based on its recent analysis of the North American hosted interactive voice response (IVR) services market, Frost & Sullivan has recognized Tellme[R], a Microsoft[R] subsidiary, with the 2007 North American Frost & Sullivan Award for Product Line Strategy.

The Award acknowledges Tellme's excellence in the development and deployment of large volume voice services and platform solutions to its brand name customers.

Hosted IVR solutions have presented a compelling and cost-effective alternative to on-premise based solutions for the past couple of years. Significant reductions in upfront capital expenditures and maintenance costs, combined with flexibility and agility of deployment represent some of the key drivers for rapid adoption of hosted IVR services in the market.

"Tellme has been a leading provider of hosted voice solutions including customer self service, directory assistance, and speech-enabled mobile applications," says Frost & Sullivan Global Program Manager Ashwin Iyer. "The company has been one of the pioneers in VoiceXML application delivery, and hosts one of the largest on-demand voice self service platforms in the world."

Enhancing the caller experience by delivering solutions with best-in-class quality audio, state-of-the art voice user interface design, and high automation and speech recognition rates has been a key part of Tellme's strategy for this marketplace.

The company has leveraged its experience in hosted VXML applications to enhance its voice self service solutions with features such as personalization, contextually relevant selling and optimized call design flows that are aimed at improving the caller experience.

Tellme lays a great deal of emphasis on monitoring the performance of its applications to ensure high automation rates and enhance revenue generation opportunities through cross-selling and up-selling within the self-service menus.

The company's revenue is primarily generated through its enterprise solution sales along with sizeable income from voice automating directory assistance for its carrier clients. Targeting large customers, each contributing millions of dollars of revenue per year, Tellme's platform handled about 2 billion calls in 2006 and processed over 10 billion utterances.

The company quite effectively utilized free voice portals and business finder services through 1-800-555-TELL to showcase its technology among end users and to test the market for a variety of applications.

Tellme currently powers about 30 percent of Directory Assistance calls within the U.S. and continues to grow its customer base and traffic volume.

"Evidently, Tellme has grown at an extremely accelerated pace, based on its successful penetration of the directory assistance market," cites Iyer. "It is this strategic repurposing of its core voice platform technology that has helped Tellme to build its brand and assume a position of prominence within the hosted IVR services market."

For its strong vision for the future, which includes delivery of multimodal platforms that will unify and enhance the caller experience across multiple contact channels, Tellme is the worthy recipient of 2007 North American Frost & Sullivan Award for Product Line Strategy.

Each year Frost & Sullivan presents this Award to the company that has demonstrated the most insight into customer needs and product demands. The recipient company should have optimized its product line by leveraging products with the various price, performance, and feature points required by the market.

Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research in order to identify best practices in the industry.

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