26th June 2006

- Speech Recognition demonstrates immediate benefits for a well known UK Personal Lines Insurance broker -

London, UK – June 26th, 2006 - Fluency Voice Technology, (www.fluencyvoice.com) the speech recognition application company, has today announced that The OutRight Company, a specialist personal lines insurance broker providing a skilled and tailored resource to national and regional brokers and blue chip corporate clients, has selected Fluency’s latest packaged application, the Virtual Speech Agent (VSA) suite™, to underpin its current and future demand for speech enabled customer services.

Ray Westwick is head of business partnerships at OutRight and explains, “We operate in a fast moving and highly competitive marketplace and we are passionate about the role that technology can play in increasing the speed and efficiency of our service whilst also improving the customer experience.” Ray continues, “Speech recognition, when used appropriately, can deliver immense benefit to our organisation in terms of reduced overhead, better response times and an optimised and competitively superior service.  This all impacts customer service and therefore retention but significantly it also benefits regulated industries such as ours with improved compliance.”

Ray and his team conducted market research on speech recognition systems and selected Fluency in favour of a number of rival suppliers. The Fluency’s VSA Suite is made up of a series of applications, each of which can work independently, but can also be deployed together throughout the enterprise depending on specific business needs. This offered OutRight a selection of applications to automate their call centre workflows and to change and maintain the system internally. Using open-standards and component-based technology, the VSA Suite has enabled OutRight to deploy speech recognition investment rapidly, flexibly and at a low cost.

“We proactively chose to trial speech recognition technologies in our business and the Fluency VSA suite gave us the flexibility to do this simply and quickly and then learn from the experience,” added Ray.  “This is exactly what we have done. We selected a number of simple but overhead-intensive tasks and we automated them with the Fluency VSA Suite. One of the applications we selected was Router which allows our callers to use a conversational approach to achieve their desired destination, they are then categorised based on their needs and then simply routed to the right person or department.”  This enables our expert agents to handle the more complex and revenue generating transactions.  “Routing these calls to the right destination has already demonstrated that it will improve customer service levels and reduce costs,” added Ray.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg for speech recognition at OutRight.  This initial deployment has revealed a number of customer enquiries and tasks that can be automated and optimised using the Fluency VSA suite including a travel insurance quote application which is already under development. Ray is optimistic for the future of speech commenting, “Standing still just isn’t an option at OutRight.  We see the efficiency and customer service improvements that we can achieve by using a virtual agent to handle simple repeatable tasks. Customers now demand 24/7 self service and that is exactly what we can provide with Fluency’s VSA Suite. The opportunity to improve service levels, reduce costs and maintain that all important competitive-edge is boosted significantly with the application of speech recognition across our business.”

Philip Padfield is Fluency’s CEO and comments, “We are delighted to welcome OutRight to our expanding list of service-driven organisations who see the tremendous competitive-edge that can be achieved through 24/7 service availability.  Our VSA suite is perfectly positioned to help those organisations deploy speech applications quickly with the added control of being able to configure, manage, monitor and report on the applications thereby continuously improving how the systems best serve the customer needs. Putting this capability in our customers’ hands liberates them to make speech work for them without the need to rely on outside suppliers which can be time consuming and very costly.”

About Fluency Voice Technology

Fluency Voice Technology is a leading provider of packaged speech recognition applications for use in call centers. Our solutions enable enterprises to significantly reduce costs and enhance customer service by automating much of the high volume call center activities.

Key sectors for which Fluency has developed applications are Financial Services, Travel & Transport, Utilities, Telecoms and Retail. Fluency has always been at the forefront of speech recognition and has changed the way in which businesses use speech by introducing the first ever packaged speech application in 2002. Fluency has offices in the UK, US and India.

About OutRight

OutRight is a specialist personal lines insurance broker providing a skilled and tailored resource to international, national and regional brokers and blue chip corporate clients. We also operate our own book of motor insurance under the Auto Direct brand.

OutRight was a self-contained business division within HSBC (operating as HSBC Select (UK) Limited) until a Management Buy-Out in April 2003. In September 2005, the entire share capital of OutRight was acquired by Fortis (UK), although the business will remain a separate regulated entity and continue to trade as The OutRight Company UK Limited.

OutRight has a turnover in excess of £13m, and shows consistent growth. The business is profitable and very stable, having a broad spread of clients and contractual agreements covering 3 and 5 year terms. OutRight's GWP currently stands at around £55m.

Our purpose is to provide multi-channel transaction, support and contact management services for personal lines business which can realise the full potential of our clients' customer bases.  For more information please visit www.outright.co.uk