Nancy Jamison posted a nice write up on her blog about a recent Voxify webcast where Voxify presented with Continental on a new outbound voice app we just rolled out for Continental that calls customers up to 24 hours before their flight and offers to check them into their flight. It’s an especially great app for Continental’s frequent fliers, since the sooner they check in, the better their chance of getting an upgrade. Nancy provides a good description of the main features of the app near the end of her post. I’m especially excited about this deployment, because I developed the integration to the remote dialer that is actually placing the phone calls.
As Nancy points out, this is the kind of outbound call that customers actually do want to receive. We’re working on a lot of stuff like this, so hopefully more of the outbound calls people receive in the future will be helpful calls, instead of just telemarketing, collections and surveys with no compensation for your time.
The outbound calling apps we build also go way beyond “read-only” notification calls. These are interactive calls that let you do things like ask to have a message repeated or reschedule the call for a more convenient time. Rescheduling a call using DTMF (i.e., pressing digits on a keypad) is terrible comparing to doing it with speech. For this application, speech recognition is also used to prompt for how you want to receive your check in confirmation, check in for multiple flights, collect information about infants or passengers under the age of thirteen, ask about upgrades, and a lot more.