MUMBAI, INDIA: United Arab Emirates (UAE) based du, the new integrated telecommunications service provider, has deployed Lattice Bridge Infotech's (LBIT) speech technology to collect customers' feedback.

With the automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology, du has been successful in addressing its customers' needs along with marketing of new services and products in a cost-effective way.

According to C. Mohan Ram, LBIT's managing director, du has a large subscriber base from Indian subcontinent; however, du's call centers were short of Hindi and Malayalam speaking call agents, which can address needs of those customers.

The telecom was facing shortage of Indian language speaking staffs, higher operational costs of call centers and the Indian language speaking agents. And on the other hand, the company wanted to focus on customers from India with improved customer satisfaction (CSAT) and was keen to reach out to them with new products and services.

"So, in order to reach out to the large subscribers from Indian subcontinent, du Telecom was looking for an automated solutions that could solve its purpose as well as reduce call center cost," Ram said.

LBIT offered its ASR technology, which is now helping the telecom to make outbound calls to the customers in Hindi and Malayalam language. The system runs a standard questionnaire to get the feedbacks, which automatically tabulates the information to du's management.

Using the system, du is able to make about 250,000 outbound call per month for customer satisfaction (CSAT) and promoting new products and services.

About the technology, Ram explains, "The system runs on Nuance ASR engine with localization and regionalization of acoustic model to suite Malayalam and Hindi language. We use our own application with the computer-telephony integration (CTI) technology and integrated voice response (IVR) platform."

First a pilot project for one month was done before the technology was fully deployed commercially in May 2009, according to Ram and suggested that the system has benefited du in many ways.

"The automation has lowered the number of seat counts in call centers, the demand of Malayalam and Hindi speaking call agents has been addressed and overall the company has effectively lowered the operational costs," Ram concluded.