NEW YORK, NY—May 11, 2004—Tell-Eureka has named Bell Labs alumnus Dr. James Hubbell and industry veteran Peter Krogh to head up its Voice User Interface team. With a focus on usability and delivery of a high-quality caller experience, they will continue development of LevelOne Virtual CSR and further enhance its intuitive customer dialogues for this award-winning voice self-service solution.

LevelOne provides contact centers with automated virtual agents that interact with callers to troubleshoot technical support problems and that are highly effective at resolving caller issues. With an experience much like the one provided by a live agent, c allers have consistently given LevelOne high marks for usability in its customer satisfaction survey. More than 90 percent of customers that used LevelOne over the past year said that they liked the automated service and would use it again to resolve an issue.

“Tell-Eureka is pushing the boundaries of speech recognition technology to enable customer-to-machine dialogues that actually walk callers through a process to resolve an issue – much like the service they would get from a live agent,” said Dr. Hubbell. “The voice user interface challenge in automating technical support is in getting the caller to perform a series of complicated tasks. It is essential for LevelOne to keep the caller engaged with a highly intuitive dialog that reinforces his or her positive experience and most importantly, results in successfully resolved problems.”

LevelOne, using advanced speech recognition technology, has the unique ability to understand the reason for a call and provide tailored instructions that are specific to each issue. LevelOne steps the caller through the troubleshooting process and ensures that each task is completed successfully to avoid callbacks. Through this process-driven approach, LevelOne attains high resolution rates, handling the most common calls and freeing live agents to focus on more complex caller requests. The automated agent is continually trained to leverage best practices and deliver highly consistent customer service around the clock. LevelOne significantly reduces per-call costs and the overall cost of operations.

“Automating a technical support call is a very complex process that goes well beyond the traditional speech applications used in finance and travel. It requires the ability first to understand the symptoms that a caller is experiencing, and then to diagnose the root problem so that troubleshooting can begin,” said Krogh. “Over the past three years Tell-Eureka has developed unique technology and technical support domain expertise to enable us to quickly design a sophisticated voice user interface for this most challenging of applications. The high caller satisfaction scores from our customer deployments further validate our approach.”

Customer satisfaction results come from an on-going survey given to callers from companies using LevelOne for voice self-service, including a large cable and broadband service provider and a consumer electronics manufacturer. These companies have reduced operating costs significantly with LevelOne while maintaining a high level of customer service.

Dr. Hubbell is an expert in human factors with in-depth experience in developing voice and multi-modal applications and in usability evaluation. In addition to his work at Bell Labs and AT&T Labs, Hubbell founded Design for Users and served as a project manager for Human Factors International. He holds a Ph. D. in Experimental Psychology from Iowa State University and has authored and presented numerous papers.

Peter Krogh is an industry authority on Voice User Interface design. Prior to joining Tell-Eureka, he founded VUI Design Services, where he created state-of-the-art speech recognition applications. Previously he served as the Director of Voice Design for Voxeo and was a program manager for Microsoft. He frequently speaks at industry events like Speechtek and has published numerous articles on voice application design.

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Tell-Eureka Contact: Chris McManus CenterStage Communications 718-832-9154 cmcmanus@centerstagecomm.com