Directory assistance

 Directory assistance

The call centers of telecom operators traditionally provide classical directory assistance services helping the consumers to retrieve the phone number in the white or yellow pages, based on the name and location of the requested people or company.

New emerging directory assistance are starting to provide additional services like searches of stores on multiple criteria or location based services on both internet web sites and call centers. Both traditional and enhanced directory assistance services are getting large amounts of routine calls with poor added value of the live call center operators.

Partial or total automation of those dialogs may generate dramatic cost savings, and free agents time to provide new value added services to the customers.

Thanks to its ability to automatically generate dialogs to browse large database, VocaBase® is particularly suited to build speech-enabled self-service directory assistance portals.


 The solution

The VocaBase® application template for directory assistance allows callers to make residential or business searches in their mother tongue and 24/24, in the white and yellow pages directories, based on name and location or to perform reverse search based on phone numbers.
VocaBase® is particularly useful for enhanced searches in the yellow pages directories content where the searches may be performed on an increasing amount of attributes.

VocaBase® enables to retrieve information based on multiple combined criteria like :

  • a Chinese restaurant
  • close to the central station
  • open on Sunday noon
  • preferably with a garden
  • offering menus for less than 50 €

Vocabase® does not only prompt callers for their searches but also guides them in a hierarchical top down process, with automated proposals depending on the directory contents.

It provides lists of result or automatically asks the caller more significant criteria to refine the search if the results are too numerous.

The solution template for VocaBase® voice servers include a geographical database covering the target areas with a lexicon of the right phonetic pronunciation of the city and street proper names as well as the hierarchical organization of locations (country - regions - cities - districts).

In addition, the geographical coordinates of the locations allow the caller to easily find the closest stores, offices...

After identification of the exact caller's need, VocaBase® can :

  • provide the caller with the information requested by voice or SMS ;
  • transfer the call to a live operator for additional assistance ;
  • transfer the call to the phone number of the selected place.

 Benefits

An automated voice server for directory assistance will generate the following benefits :
  • Reduction of the callers' waiting time, as the voice server is immediately available to handle new calls.
  • Availability of information anywhere at anytime 24 * 7 * 365.
  • Complete multilingual service (foreign callers are guided through the database in their own language).
  • Dialogs are adapted automatically to any update in the published database.
  • Reduce system maintenance time, since the dialog adapts itself to content modification.
  • Allow the same team to update both web based and vocal services, since no technical knowledge is required for content update.

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