VocaLabs Awards TARGUSinfo and Voice Partners' Application Highest Certification In Call Completion And Call Consistency

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 15, 2004--Vocal Laboratories, the authority in measuring customers' experiences, awarded TARGUSinfo and Voice Partners an "A" rating in call completion and in call consistency. The application finished in the top tier in overall call completion and call consistency levels across all customer service operations that VocaLabs has studied including live agents and automated systems.

TARGUSinfo brought in professional design experts Voice Partners as well as testing partner VocaLabs to evaluate the design and performance of the application early in the project cycle. "By employing VocaLabs testing methodology, we captured statistically reliable data that helped us to predict how incremental changes and enhancements to our application impact customer satisfaction and performance," said Joe Saunders, VP of Business Development at TARGUSinfo.

The application was an existing speech-recognition interface for capturing customer data including names, addresses, and phone numbers. The goal of the project was to optimize the performance of the speech interface to reduce the number of calls which had to be handled manually.

After a VocaLabs study on an early version of the application, Voice Partners suggested a set of design enhancements. A follow-up study on the design was used to make additional refinements, as well as validate the initial set of changes. The enhanced application received the highest marks possible, in two out of three categories, an accomplishment achieved by only about 15% of the applications VocaLabs has studied. "At Voice Partners, we design every interaction to meet caller needs and goals--because the technology performs best when it's really transparent and easy for callers to use. The testing data and call recordings provided by VocaLabs gave us the user insight we needed to substantially improve the TARGUSinfo application," said Melissa Dougherty, Principal and Co-founder at Voice Partners.

"The TARGUSinfo application does an outstanding job of getting people through and accomplishing its objectives," commented Peter U. Leppik, CEO of VocaLabs. "Committing early to a strong development process which includes frequent design evaluation beginning at the start of the project is the best way to ensure a successful project."

About Vocal Laboratories

VocaLabs solves the need for cost effective and statistically accurate feedback about client care Speech Recognition, IVR, human agent, and tone applications. Our clients are end user enterprises, call center consultants, application providers and equipment vendors. We have the unique ability to evaluate a customer contact application at any stage of development, from prototype to live in the field using a large and demographically diverse pool of panelists.

About Voice Partners

Voice Partners is creating a revolution in the way people use automation to interact with branded services or properties, and communicate with one another, over the telephone. Our clients are focused on delivering the best service to their customers, and we share that goal: Quite simply, Voice Partners is focused on creating world-class, branded over-the-phone interactions that satisfy customers and meet business goals in new ways. We lead the industry in the design of branded voice user experiences, and are creating successful interfaces for the world's major brands and application providers.

About TARGUSinfo

Since its founding in 1993, TARGUSinfo(R) has pioneered the development of real time intelligence to help companies more productively process customer and prospect transactions. Through patented processes and data linkages, TARGUSinfo incorporates its industry-leading and standards-based speech recognition grammars and speaker verification solutions to instantly identify, recognize, authenticate, locate, verify, and route millions of customers and prospects. In addition, TARGUSinfo processes over 900 million transactions per month by linking virtually every household and business telephone number in the U.S. with information including name, postal address, predictive household buying behavior scores, risk management and store locator information. A privately held company, TARGUSinfo is headquartered in Vienna, Virginia.