20th February 2006

London, UK - February 20th , 2006 – Fluency Voice Technology, (www.fluencyvoice.com) the speech recognition company, today announced that Capita has successfully launched Fluency’s speech-enabled customer service channels for TV Licensing customers.  This project was critical in achieving the objective of offering customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week self-service options.

“With such a diverse customer base it is important that our services reflect the needs of the increasingly sophisticated customer,” explains Simon Foot, Customer Experience and Operations Manager at the BBC.  “We need to ensure that when a customer finds that slot in their hectic schedule to contact us, that they are able to complete their request first time, every time.   The voice recognition service offers our customers a straightforward convenient service and gives them the confidence that their request will be sorted, and they can tick it off their list!” 

Capita Group plc, the UK’s leading professional and support service organisation for the public and private sectors, took on the challenge of improving upon the already high level of customer service that TV Licensing maintains by implementing a speech-enabled solution to give customers a choice.  Callers can now speak with either a live customer service agent within normal business hours or a virtual agent via a speech recognition application 24 hours a day, without the hassle of queuing. 

TV Licensing’s Director of Customer Services, Mike Minahan, spearheaded a pilot project in order to ensure that the chosen solution was reliable, cost-effective and scaleable enough to accommodate the 26 million TV Licensing customers.  After evaluating the leading solutions on the market, Capita selected Fluency based on rapid deployment times, application performance and a competitive pricing model.

Capita initially launched a pilot project with Fluency allowing customer callers to use a virtual agent to change their address.  The success of the pilot allowed Capita to assess the customer acceptance of speech recognition and the efficiency of the Fluency applications.  Over 400,000 TV Licensing customers have used the Fluency application to change their address yielding a 75 percent transaction completion rate, to date.  This exceeded Capita’s initial goal for completion rate by 5 percent.

One of Capita’s major concerns when conducting the pilot was maintaining the exceptional level of customer service that the TV Licensing customers expect. Capita approaches 20 per cent of the customers it has served each month to ask them to take part in its customer satisfaction survey.  The survey shows that since the pilot’s inception, 94.8 per cent overall customer satisfaction has been maintained.

“Using Fluency gave us the flexibility to run the pilot with low capital expenditure – an essential factor taking into account the uncertainty of how the customers were going to react to the new service option,” said Mike.  “Following the outstanding success rate of the pilot, we are on schedule to launch a number of other services, such as direct debit set up and the automation of the 24/7 helpline.” added Mike.

Capita’s goal is to roll-out Fluency’s speech-enabled applications to various other customer service channels for TV Licensing.  Using Fluency, Capita will satisfy TV Licensing’s commitment to offer customers a choice of self-service or live agents on all levels of customer service.

“The achievement of both high customer satisfaction and rapid operational benefit is a testament to the quality of Fluency products and the leadership of the Capita team,” said Philip Padfield, President and CEO of Fluency Voice Technology.  “Fluency thrives on customer partnerships such as the one we have with Capita as they allow our products to be deployed with optimal benefit.” added Philip. 

About Fluency Voice Technology

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