For many technology-related companies, revelations of poor third-quarter performance – and attendant workforce cuts – have been disheartening.

 

As TMCnet reported, analysts are predicting up to 5,000 cuts at Nortel Networks Corp – a rumor the company is declining to address – while the world’s leading mobile device maker announced that it would cut nearly 600 employees and Circuit City Stores said it’s closing 155 U.S. stores.

 

While the IT market clearly won’t be spared in this slow economy, now is also a time when many telecom companies are touting their products as ways that businesses can save money and boost production and customer satisfaction.

 

Such is the case with Nuance Communications, a Burlington, Massachusetts-based speech and imaging solutions provider that recently acquired SNAPin Software.

 

Nuance (News - Alert) serves mobile operators that now are facing higher borrowing costs and slower growth in this economy. By one estimate, those operators are expected to employ more than 6 million agents – spending more than $100 billion in customer service care this year.

 

That’s where Nuance comes in. Its so-called “self-service software” – originally a SNAPin (News - Alert) product – is embedded directly on mobile devices and is designed to support, train and maintain subscribers.

 

That software is now part of Nuance’s “Mobile Care,” which company officials call a revolutionary new product designed to help operators to stay ahead their sometimes volatile market.

 

 

Recently, T-Mobile (News - Alert) USA began deploying the Nuance Mobile Care solution on some of its handsets, and officials with the mobile device carrier hailed the product as delivering a superior customer experience.

 

TMCnet recently had a chance to pose some questions to John Mahlmeister, vice president of enterprise for Nuance. Mahlmeister talked to us about what kinds of problems the Mobile Care solution addresses and what value it brings to mobile operators in this economy.

 

Our exchange follows.

 

 

John Mahlmeister: For the last two decades, self-service technologies such as interactive voice response systems – and, more recently, Web-based solutions – have been deployed by operators to reduce the burden associated with providing customer care via a live agent. Now more than ever, mobile operators are feeling the crunch with skyrocketing customer care costs requiring them to find new ways like self-service on the device to reduce costs.

 

With each call answered by a live agent costing $7 to $10, the total cost of care per user could skyrocket to more than $700 annually, on average. The customer care costs could therefore outweigh the benefits of pushing new services to certain segments, creating a lose-lose situation for operators – who stand to benefit from increased adoption of feature-rich services – and users, who aren’t getting the most out of their phones and who are missing important features that could enrich or simplify their lives.

 

With the economy in its current state, operators are looking to save even more money, which is where Nuance Mobile Care comes into play. When a consumer dials the customer care phone number, Nuance Mobile Care presents the user with advanced tools to solve their own problems directly on the handset. Users can make balance inquiries, top up and pay their bills and even run advanced diagnostics to repair device configuration and setting issues. Removing these types of calls from the call center allows the customer service representative to focus on more technical inquiries while saving millions of dollars on customer care.

 

 

JM: At a high level, customers are calling the carriers for one of two reasons – to service their account or to deal with technical issues. The vast majority of calls focus on account service issues, which is where the Nuance solution excels. Whether the query is related to status – that is, “What is my rate plan?” “How many minutes do I have left?” “When is my next payment due?” – or transactional, such as making a payment, adding a feature or buy a ringtone, Nuance Mobile Care is quickly becoming the preferred interface for handling the solution. More complex account issues such as discrepancy resolution – for example, “I shouldn’t have to pay for that dropped call,” more often than not require an agent.

 

In regard to technical issues, Nuance Mobile Care currently focuses on the most common and predictable problems, seeking to identify the problem as early as possible and provide basic troubleshooting steps – that is, basic registry and network settings. If the troubleshooting exercise takes more than three steps, we recommend that the operators put that customer in contact with a qualified resource. In this case, Nuance Mobile Care is uniquely positioned to deliver the caller to the most qualified resource, as it can use all of the information resident on the phone to pinpoint the source of the problem and provide the information directly to the operator’s troubleshooting experts.

 

 

JM: In the complex and highly competitive mobile marketplace, fewer and fewer things separate one operator from another. Common network technologies and high-volume handset platforms drive economies of scale, but they also serve to minimize opportunities for differentiation and value added. Mobile operators worldwide have been looking to next-generation networks and data-capable handsets to bring the innovation of the Internet to mobile telephony. The hope has been to leverage this innovation as an opportunity to gain a measure of differentiation, as well as to increase both retention and revenues.

 

Nuance Mobile Care provides operators a differentiated offering by delivering their own customized self-service experience to each subscriber that can be constantly refined remotely via OTA updates, and has been tailored to the subscriber’s device, rate plan, preferred language, and customer segment. Subscribers receive a faster, more efficient, and more enjoyable service experience overall, resulting in increased customer satisfaction. Help can be delivered when the user wants it and where they want it, rather than having to go to their PC or find a store.

 

 

JM: Nuance Mobile Care can be utilized by any size operator because the business issues as far as customer care are relatively the same across the industry. The value Nuance Mobile Care brings to any operator is the ability to lower customer care costs by taking calls out of the call center and delivering a superior customer experience on the device that is preferred over IVR, Web or going to a store.