Nuance to buy SNAPin and transform customer service via cellphones

by Stuart Corner

Wednesday, 20 August 2008

Page 1 of 2 ! Speech recognitions specialist, Nuance Communications, has announced its intent to acquire - for $US180m in shares - privately-held SNAPin, a provider of mobile device and server self-service technology, claiming that that the combination of its and SNAPin's technologies will "transform the way mobile operators and enterprises interact with consumers in real-time on mobile devices." According to Nuance, "With this acquisition Nuance is uniquely positioned to address the significant global opportunity in customer care as it converges around the mobile phone as the primary consumer access point." Nuance says that companies worldwide will employ more than six million agents and spend more than $US100 billion in customer care in 2008 responding to more than 200 billion calls into customer service numbers. It estimates that a third of these are placed from mobile phones and that this figure is expected to grow to two-thirds before the end of the decade. "A Nuance and SNAPin combination can deliver effective care for cents-per-call compared to agent-assisted calls that approximate $US4.50 per call on average," Nuance says. SNAPin's SelfService technology was designed primarily to automate support of cellphone devices. It "intercepts calls to customer support organisations and presents each user with personalised tools to resolve most support issues on the device, quickly and easily solving as many as three out of four customer problems without requiring a call to the service centre." It "automatically repairs critical device and network settings, such as those required for roaming, messaging, or data networking." You can read a more detailed review of what the company does in this iTWire blog. A demonstration of the SNAPin products can be found here. CONTINUED << First page <   1 2 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

< Next story in category		Previous story in the category >

Visitors last 30 days Suscribers

904,266 13,751