| Power Lunch and ... |
a Power Lunch*
and a feature story
- on you - in Backbone
and an iPhone or a BlackBerry
To enter...
Fill out a readership survey
(confidential)
*with Dave Chalk, technology expert and our editor, Peter Wolchak |
|
|
| CRM wave two |
July 6, 2006 |
Backbone profiles MultiVision Communications, a Branham Up and Comer
Fred Gallagher, a self-proclaimed “adrenaline junkie,” admits he sometimes takes risks. He jumps out of planes and surfs in icy waters. And three years ago he started a company centred around a new kind of voice technology. A risk? Perhaps. But a calculated one.
“We are in an evolving world. Your vision needs to go beyond the singular. You need to be able to adapt to multiple visions, and be able to adapt to what the world brings you,” said Gallagher, president and CEO of Markham, Ont.-based MultiVision Communications (www.mvcinc.com), in explanation of his company’s name and mandate.
What makes the company unique is its “proactive customer contact,” he said. “Reaching out and touching people when they most need it, and perhaps least expect it,” he said. “To do that, you really need to see where your customers are, and what you need to do in order to get to them.”
Gallagher said many companies that installed expensive Customer Relationship Management systems are still waiting for a return on that investment. He decided a solution that offered a more proactive approach was required.
The company’s flagship product, Speechezy, adds functionality to a customer’s existing interactive voice response (IVR) phone system, Gallagher said. This allows for the creation of virtual agents which employ speech recognition and text-to-speech technology to craft interactive responses.
“For example, many of the utility companies in Canada use our product to remind customers of pending service appointments, or to advise them of potential service outages, or even collect meter readings. We deliver that to the customer, without the use of an agent.”
The product, Gallagher said, differs from others because the message is personalized to the client. “This allows us to take text from [an existing] script, merge it with dynamic fields, such as the terms of the appointment and your name, and be able to deliver it to you,” Gallagher said.
Current customers range from small medical offices to large banks, he said. Whatever the business, the promise is greater efficiency from existing automated systems while reducing the number of calls that require agent handling, he said—sometimes by as much as 85 per cent.
The Branham cut
The firms that make it onto Branham’s Up and Comers list typically have a mix of healthy revenue and products which boast good future promise, according to Branham’s president and CEO Wayne Gudbranson. MultiVision Communications is one such company.
“We feel there is great potential with their product. For a small company that is only three years old, it is very impressive,” he said. “They are comparable to a much larger and more mature company, in terms of their revenue and their marketing statistics.”
Because voice is older technology, it has taken a back seat in the last few years, Gudbranson said: the popularity of the Internet, texting and e-mail has been stealing all the limelight. But that is about to change — voice is entering its “second stage,” with more voice-enabled applications being developed, including the next wave of CRM solutions.
“We think voice (applications) will become even more prevalent in the near future. And MultiVision was among the first to have the vision that voice would rebound.”
|
|
|
| Top 300 Issue |
 
|
| Gadget of the Week (Canadian) |
|
Boost your cell
ARC Wireless Freedom Blade
Mobile data and voice are great, as long as the signal is strong. And while mobile networks are pretty good these days, road warriors quickly discover that dead zones still exist.
more>>
|
| Gadget of the Week (Japanese) |
Sounds of Japan
Why record just the visual when you can capture the sounds as well.
more>> |
| Backblog RSS feed |
Click to subscribe  |
|
sponsored by 
