SAN JOSE, Calif., September 14, 2004 - Cisco Systems, Inc. today announced that Nestle Waters North America, Inc., is deploying the Cisco® Customer Voice Portal (formerly Cisco Internet Service Node). The Cisco Customer Voice Portal (CVP) version 3.0 helps enable businesses to improve customer service while reducing operational costs through the use of self-service voice applications.
The Cisco CVP's open platform allows enterprises to avoid "forklift" upgrades of existing contact center equipment and to protect their existing investments by using installed contact center technology. Cisco CVP and Cisco IP Contact Center (IPCC) solutions form the core of the Customer Interaction Network, allowing companies to extend customer service across an entire organization and transparently blend self- and assisted-service for an enhanced customer experience. Customers are more likely to utilize the intuitive voice self-service capabilities enabled by Cisco CVP than traditional intelligent voice response (IVR) systems, which are limited by inflexible legacy architectures.
"We're able to offer a much more personalized service to our customers by incorporating speech recognition into our self-service platform," says Kurt Mey, national technology manager for Nestle Waters North America, Inc. "Customers are able to complete their transactions in a much more natural, conversational manner than they could ever do in a touch-tone environment. The feedback from customers has been very positive and the results show in our IVR utilization numbers."
"Cisco's Customer Voice Portal provides customers with the most comprehensive suite of network elements in the market today, providing customers with a robust set of choices for application development and reusability," said Mark Plakias, senior analyst at Zelos Group. "The combination of Cisco's CVP for time division multiplexing (TDM) or Internet Protocol (IP) environments puts the industry on notice that Cisco is taking speech and next-generation IVR to the next level."
The Cisco CVP supports both speech-enabled and touchtone applications that can be quickly integrated with backend data and business rules available through the Web, using Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML) standards. The graphical development tools provided with the Cisco CVP help to enable assembly of the most complex voice applications faster and at lower cost than traditional IVR or other voice portal technology by using voice dialog components that facilitate reuse.
The Cisco CVP uses a Cisco gateway to provide call termination and voice browser functionality. A Web server hosts the application. Mey continued, "This gives Nestle Waters North America a highly distributed, easily managed IVR solution that helps to protect our investment and offers us application migration for network convergence in our IP-based contact center."
Toward the Customer Interaction Network
The Cisco CVP enables customers to move into the next phase of customer contact — beyond today's contact center to a Customer Interaction Network. The Customer Interaction Network is a distributed, IP-based customer service infrastructure that comprises a continuously evolving suite of innovative, multi-channel services and customer relationship management applications. A Customer Interaction Network extends customer service capabilities across the entire organization, giving businesses a more integrated and collaborative approach to customer satisfaction.
