Paris, le 23 avril 2004. – Direct Assurance is France's leading direct car insurance company. The company was created in 1992 as a subsidiary of he AXA group. With a 2003 revenue of 173 million euros, Direct Assurance is one of the insurance companies with the highest growth rates in France in the damage sector. The company has more than 400,000 customers who benefit from competitive rates, warranties and services for car and home insurance policies. Their expert team of over 600 insurance professionals are at the customer's disposal seven days a week. Direct Assurance's goals for the French market are ambitious - to reach 500,000 customers by 2006, and to become number ten in the French car insurance market, and as such a reference player for the sector.

To support its growth, Direct Assurance is depending on new technologies to improve both the quality and the productivity of its customer service. The company's information technology and logistics department, with a team of more than fifty IT professionals, recently won the 2004 " Enterprise and Information Society " Award for its new internet web site in the "Growth and economical performance" category. This site allows to deliver on-line personalised quotes, in answer to a growing demand from customers for new services reachable anywhere at any time. In 2003, more than one third of new customers contacted Direct Assurance for the first time through the Internet.

In parallel, with its increase in inbound telephone traffic, Direct Assurance launched a large modernisation project of its call centre in 2004, aiming at improving its customer satisfaction with a higher availability of its customer representatives. The project included the integrated implementation of a new telephone switch (Alcatel), a Computer Telephony Integration software suite (Genesys), and new interactive voice response server in natural language (VocaBase®), operating in conjunction with call centre customer agents.

The implementation of new text-to-speech synthesis (Acapela TTS) and speech recognition (Scansoft ASR), will allow to improve the availability of information provided to the customers, from the reception of a new quote to the follow-up of claims. Direct Assurance selected VocaBase® from DB Scape because of its capability to easily manage automated dialogues with customers from a catalogue of information and its integration with the Genesys environment for operator-assisted calls management. The project will begin with a pilot phase concerning the attendance and qualification of calls for quotes, and the evaluation of call centre quality of service.