Nortel (News - Alert) said that it has set up new self-service voice capabilities for Nestle Nespresso, the company offering portioned coffee and one of the operating units of the Nestle Group.

 

Thanks to these new self-service voice capabilities, Nespresso is able to reduce customer waiting times and cut the Customer Relationship Center annual costs by up to 16 percent, according to Nortel.

 

Nortel’s officials said that their company’s automated speech recognition technology enables Nespresso to offer its customers “faster response” to their inquiries through a service hotline.

 

Officials explained that customers can complete either all or part of their order through voice prompts, which eliminates the need to place customers on hold for the next available coffee specialist, resulting in reduced waiting times.

 

The voice system is multilingual in German, French and Italian and allows Nespresso to cut contact center costs by completing more calls with the same number of agents, according to officials.

 

Initially, Nespresso had introduced the new self-service voice capabilities for its 180-agent Customer Relationship Center near Lausanne, Switzerland, where nearly two-thirds of the incoming calls are answered in German, and about one-third in French, and the rest in Italian.

 

The center relies on Nortel’s Media Processing Server (MPS) 500 speech recognition platform, and in addition the system also uses Nortel Communication Server (CS) 1000 with automatic routing to an appropriate agent through Nortel's Contact Center solution.

 

“Our coffee specialists in the Relationship Centre in Sion handle more than 300,000 calls a year," said Marc-Alain Dubois, market director for Switzerland at Nespresso.

 

He also said that with the new Nortel solution, his company can offer customers a comprehensive personal service without long wait times even in peak periods.

 

“Nortel has worked with Nespresso to meet its communications needs for many years, and again they turned to us when they were looking to increase productivity at their Customer Relationship Center and reduce operating costs,” said Thomas Marfurt, country manager at Nortel Switzerland.

 

He also said that with Nortel's self-service, voice response technology, they were able to design new communications capabilities for Nespresso that could be incorporated into their existing technologies to help them meet huge call volumes without employing more coffee specialist agents.

 

The companies said that extension of the system to a number of additional international Customer Relationship Centers is currently being planned.

 

For several years now, Nespresso has had a Nortel voice solution with over 300 TDM and VoIP phones in use.