Best Enterprise Service: Ikea’s voice portal from Excelsis wins Voice Award
Stuttgart, 10/07/2009 – Yesterday, Ikea’s voice portal from Excelsis won the Voice Award in the Best Enterprise Service category. The Voice Award is the Academy Award of the voice community in Central Europe and is awarded to the best German-speaking voice portals and its providers. The jury nominated Ikea’s self-service voice portal in three categories: Best Practice Award, Best Innovation Award and Best Enterprise Service-Award.
Voice portal offers comprehensive and innovative services
The voice portal offers numerous services, such as product availability checks for more than 10.000 products, a local store finder, information on shipping costs and payment options as well as text message notifications. One of the system’s outstanding features is the so-called mixed initiative dialog that combines the advantages of strictly guided dialogs with those of natural language input. When phonetically preparing the product names, specifics aspects such as Scandinavian special characters and variations in pronunciation are considered.
Ikea’s voice portal is based on customised versions of several Excelsis applications for speech enabled self-services. The application server used, is a high-performance OEM version of Voxeo’s Voice Objects Server. The technology deployed is one of the globally leading telephony based communication solutions.
“Our voice portals’ objective is to cover and fulfil requirements for customer orientation and cost efficiency. We are very happy that an independent jury acknowledges our efforts by positive ratings”, says Christian Sauter, CEO of Excelsis.
“We congratulate Ikea and Excelsis on winning the Voice Award”, emphasises Michael Codini, managing director of Voxeo Germany GmbH. “This award is a confirmation to our commitment on software innovation and quality and proves that investments into modern IVR and speech technology pay off.”
Excelsis awarded repeatedly
Since the introduction of the Voice Award, voice portals from Excelsis have been nominated and awarded multiple times: among others price comparison 11864 (Deutsche Telekom), UBS voice banking portal, Swisscom password reset and the first voice-controlled dating platform LUCY. Every voice portal implemented by Excelsis is based on a standardised and open solutions platform and integrates the latest speech technology. Professional VUI design provides for a positive user experience.
About Excelsis
Excelsis is one of the internationally leading vendors of self service solutions based on voice and web portals. With our software, companies from different branches automate their contact centre processes. Excelsis delivers products and solutions for almost all industries including financial services, health care, telecommunications, media and entertainment, retailing, logistics and public transportation.
We work for companies such as Cablecom, Deutsche Telekom, Ikea, Medion, Orange, Siemens, Swisscom, UBS or Vattenfall. We are building partnerships with companies from the fields of technology, system integration and consulting.
About Voxeo
Voxeo eases communication and, through its technology, allows for easy and economic realisation, administration, analysis and optimisation of unified communication and self-services applications for voice, SMS, IM, Twitter, web chat and mobile web. Voxeo continuously works on improving the benefit of such communication solutions through open standards and innovations. The company passionately fights for its customers’ success. More than 100.000 developers and 45.000 companies (among them half of the Fortune 100) use solutions by Voxeo. Voxeo supports customers, partners and developers from all over the world: Orlando, Beijing, Cologne and London. Do you want to know more? Then visit their web site www.voxeo.com or communicate to them via blogs.voxeo.com or twitter.com/Voxeo.
Voxeo´s VoiceObjects products are the globally leading solutions for efficient development, provision, administration and analysis of self-services applications. These solutions enable companies and mobile network operators to reduce the complexity and costs of innovative phone-based services and improve customer satisfaction at the same time. VoiceObjects design once-deploy anywhere-architecture makes it easy to develop an application once and use it on all phone based channels available, such as voice, video, text (IM, SMS, USSD) and operate it on the mobile web.
All of Voxeo’s products and services are available for free as developer versions. Please visit: www.voxeo.com/free.
Contact
Excelsis Business Technology AG
Maria Widra
Wilhelmsplatz 8
70182 Stuttgart
Phone +49 711 620 30 425
maria.widra@excelsisnet.com
Voxeo Germany GmbH
Sabine Winterkamp
Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse
51429 Bergisch Gladbach
Phone +49 2204 845 142
swinterkamp@voxeo.com
Read here to learn more about which other voice portal solutions won an award or got nominated.
