NAB inks Telstra & VeCommerce speech recognition deal

Telstra has sold a VeCommerce speech recognition solution to the National Australia Bank (NAB).

Through VeConnect's Natural Language Speech Recognition application, callers to NAB will be routed to more than 150 destinations within the bank by simply stating their request.

Telstra led the sale and implementation of VeConnect as part of the bank's new customer service initiative.  

It will launch a single telephone number (136 NAB) to cover all of the bank's customer enquiries.

"Speech recognition gives traditional telephony integrators a new stream of customer engagement," said Martyn Riddle, general manager of marketing for VeCommerce.

"We have found that a few of these integrators have come across opportunities whilst undertaking their normal PABX/call centre sales activities and have partnered with us to provide a total solution.  

"In the NAB deployment, Telstra acted as a systems integrator," he added.
 
Telstra managed the co-ordination and deployment of the solution that integrates into NAB's existing telephony infrastructure and utilises VeCommerce's Australian Financial Services Statistical Language Model.

Telstra will also provide first level support for the solution.

According to Paul Geason executive director of Telstra Enterprise & Government, the company has long been an advocate of speech recognition technology and looks forward to working with NAB.

"By introducing this sophisticated speech recognition technology we will be able to spend more time focusing on the needs of our customers," said Ann-Marie Chamberlain, general manager, Direct, Retail Financial Services NAB.
 
"Customer service excellence is crucial to us at NAB and it is imperative that the introduction of this new technology improves our ability to meet the high customer service standards we have set for ourselves."