arrow Customers arrow Case Study: Convergys
Customer Case Study: Convergys Print E-mail

It has been over two years since Convergys Corporation selected Audium as its service creation environment for speech applications. Over this period, Convergys has taken full advantage of Audium’s extensibility to drive features into the Audium framework that enable Convergys to deliver speech applications better, faster, and cheaper.

In late 2000, as Convergys was beginning to deploy applications to SpeechPort™ - its hosted speech platform – they recognized the importance of the emerging VoiceXML standard and its ability to extend a company’s Web infrastructure to a new channel, the telephone.

convergysquote1.gif It was apparent to Convergys that tools would soon emerge that would abstract the complexity and cumbersome nature of markup languages from the developer. Convergys embarked on a rigorous RFI process to evaluate available tools. From a performance and feature perspective, Audium was the clear leader and was selected by Convergys as their internal development tool.

Convergys projects are complex, mission critical applications that run at very high volumes for large organizations including major airlines, banks, government agencies, and telcos. The company needed a comprehensive application platform that would support the entire development lifecycle and help leverage existing investment in a robust telephony framework.

Convergys chose Audium because it provided:

  • A complete framework to accelerate application development. Audium helps reduce development cycles and makes it easier to deliver quality applications quickly by standardizing application development practices through a common development interface. Additionally, Audium fosters skill set specialization by separating the roles of application component developers and voice interface designers, enabling component developers to share their work across multiple applications.

  • An open platform that tightly integrates with their existing telephony and computing infrastructure. Because of the large amount of money and time spent building and maintaining their network, it was critical that the chosen solution “snap-in” to their existing architecture. Audium works with both the telephony framework and J2EE application server that Convergys was already using.

  • Separation of development tools from runtime architecture, so both Convergys developers and Open Hosting customers can create services that run in their standardized environment. With Audium, Convergys can provide customers with the widest range of application control. Open Hosting allows customers to create and modify their application within their own facilities for control and investment protection while taking advantage of the speech and telephony severs hosted within the Convergys carrier-grade facilities.

  • Framework to promote use of Convergys ExpressWare application elements. Convergys has created one of the largest libraries of VoiceXML application components and templates called ExpressWare. The Audium environment provides developers with easier access to all of these components, making it easier and faster to develop speech applications for the SpeechPort platform.

  • Flexibility for the future. Audium protects Convergys’ investment in applications and reusable components because they can run on all market leading voice gateways supported by Audium. The ability to deploy the same applications on multiple different gateways means that they will be able to leverage the unique capabilities of gateways in the future.

The Results:

Convergys is using Audium to develop both internal and external-facing speech applications across a wide range of vertical industries. In practice, Convergys has a business unit dedicated to using Audium to enhance and expand Convergys ExpressWare components, plus a solutions group with more than 70 developers. The Audium palette created by Convergys includes vertical and horizontal components that leverage grammar tuning, dialogue design, and interface design to help the solutions group consistently deliver high quality applications.

The components deploy on the robust and scalable Audium production environment that snaps into the Convergys Speech Application Framework and Convergys ExpressWare component architecture, Convergys’ existing telephony and enterprise infrastructure. This tight fit helps Audium meet their rigorous quality standards and offers a framework to ensure full redundancy for every call.

Using Audium allows Convergys to differentiate itself as a provider that can quickly and reliably deliver high quality speech solutions to market.

"Our team has seen significant productivity gains by building applications with Audium, and through Convergys ExpressWare, we continue to extend the product, driving greater and greater quality and efficiencies into our speech application lifecycle. We have found a great partner in Audium that continues to respond to our needs and continues to establish itself as a leader in this space,” said Steven Bittner, Vice President of Technology, Convergys.

Based on their success, Convergys has formally committed to standardizing on Audium for speech application deployments and is actively promoting Audium for customers looking to build their own applications to be deployed with Convergys in an open hosting model.

Learn more about Convergys' SpeechPort platform and ExpressWare application elements.