IP Communications

For the past eight years, the number of mobile phone subscribers has grown globally at an average rate of 24 percent year over year. Enterprises competing for market share and looking to improve customer satisfaction ratings can “use multimodal applications to enable self-service for mobile device users” as a differentiator, according to Daniel Hong, Lead Analyst, Datamonitor.

 

“When looking at the evolution of phone-based self-service technologies, it began with touch-tone, progressed to include speech, and now the next phrase: multimodal enablement,” Hong said. “This next stage in the evolution of phone-based self-service includes personalization and takes into account the proliferation of mobile devices.”

 

Mindful of those trends, Convergys, a relationship management products vendor, has announced Intervoice (News - Alert) Voice Portal 6.0 and the introduction of its application creation environment – Interaction Composer.

 

With IVP 6, according to the company, clients can create personalized speech products, using a set of rules and policies that can be constructed by integrating with the Convergys (News - Alert) Dynamic Decisioning product.  The release gives users a voice portal platform designed to facilitate the development of multimodal applications for mobile self-service.

 

Interaction Composer is described by the Convergysians as “an Eclipse-based Integrated Development Environment for building, deploying, and managing applications with a drag and drop components and extensibility framework.”

 

It’d be hard to say Convergys is betting on the wrong horse here. Norway’s Opera recently released their periodical report finding that mobile Web access “continues its march towards surpassing desktop Web access.”

 

Across the world, more people are using their phone to go online. “This trend is clear as unique users, page views and data transfers for consumer Opera Mini users have continued to rise,” Opera officials say, adding that “as quality mobile browsers proliferate, users tend to access the same sites and services. This emergence of One Web will only continue as the lines separating device types such as PCs and mobile phones increasingly blur.”