IVR

As the largest health care provider in St. Paul, MN, HealthEast Care System was struggling with an out-of-date contact center and communication solution. The health care organization is on a mission to enable patients and internal users to use a variety of communication channels, and to more easily access data needed to improve the interactions. As part of a larger strategy around solution delivery to its internal and external customers, HealthEast turned to Mitel for its communication needs.

At ITEXPO in Miami last week I had the opportunity to sit down with Howard Lee, the CEO of Spoken. We talked about the current Spoken business, which is focused on Cloud Contact Centers, IVR, and other key components of the custom interaction experience. Spoken has done two key things, creating a cloud/virtualized contact center using Avaya and Cisco, and focusing on improving the IVR/automated experience through their Smart IVR technology.

In a September 2013 Ovum Research report, "The Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting a Multichannel Cloud Contact Center Vendor," the research firm addresses the evolving contact center competitive landscape that, in its opinion, is shifting from a cost-driven market to decision making based on the benefits of the Cloud. Ovum hints that any vendor eyeing the contact center market must meet enterprise demand for advanced hosted contact center services, features and functionality, such as unified communications (UC) services, voice-enabled IVR and speech analytics.