Nuance Communications Inc. is targeting carriers – and plenty of others – with a mobile application designed to cut the cost of customer-care calls.
Mobile Care is a client-server application designed to automatically launch when a user dials a customer-care call center for assistance. The application allows users to check account balances, pay bills or perform other basic tasks, or to complete the call.
The offering is a natural extension of existing Nuance speech-recognition solutions that allow telcos and other consumer-facing businesses to handle customer-care calls without using a live agent, according to Nuance executive Mikael Berner. The company plans to integrate voice functionality into Mobile Care, enabling users to talk to the phone – but not necessarily to an agent – to retrieve account information or resolve problems.
“We thought, with everything we do in the network, let’s put as much of that as possible onto the handset,” said Berner, who serves as VP of Nuance On-Demand. “We’ve put a tremendous amount of effort into this over the last year.”
The lightweight application acts a bit like an on-device portal, pre-caching much of the data on the device and updating dynamic information as needed. Nuance has already inked a deal with an unnamed carrier, and has “many deals coming through the pipeline after this one,” Berner claimed.
The Burlington, Mass.-based company hopes to cash in as it helps mobile operators slash customer-care costs that surpass $7 billion annually, according to Nuance. The application is designed to be embedded on phones, eliminating the need for a user to actively download it – or even launch it from a menu.
Beyond carriers
Interestingly, though, it’s not just network operators Nuance hopes to bag as customers for Mobile Care: A host of consumer-facing service providers could use the solution, Nuance believes, from shipping companies to cable television providers. And that could allow businesses to leverage mobile in a whole new way, according to Berner.
“The way people have thought about mobile enterprise has been from a business perspective, not a consumer perspective,” he continued. “We’re just now starting to work with enterprises.”
Nuance is well-positioned to aggressively push the new solution. The company is a behemoth in the speech-recognition space, spending more than $1 billion to swallow up competitors and other developers in the past couple of years, and the company is making strides as mobile users finally seem to be tolerating – or even embracing – the concept of using their voices to navigate applications.
Selling the application to non-wireless companies may be a tall order, however. Encouraging users to actively download the offering may be a non-starter, so Nuance may need to reach critical mass by working with carriers to distribute the application before crossing over to outside markets.
“We may be a little bit out over our skis” in approaching potential non-wireless customers, Berner conceded. “This really can transform how the consumer wants to interact (with service providers). . We’ve had extremely positive feedback, but it is going to take time.”
