What's your address?

Many telephone self-service applications could take advantage of the ability to accurately recognize the caller's address. For instance:

• To automatically handle change of address calls;
• As a way for the IVR application to look up a caller profile, e.g., as a replacement for the client number if it is unavailable;
• To provide information specific to the caller's address (e.g., a garbage collection schedule);
• To obtain the address for a package delivery.

The important question is: Can this be done accurately?

The challenges of address capture

Developing an application that can recognize addresses is one thing. Developing one that works solidly with the great majority of real callers is quite another. Here's a glimpse of what's required in order to achieve this:

• Comprehensive data cleanup — Even with an excellent address data source, a huge amount of work - acronym expansion, corrections, accentuation, etc. - is required.
• Support a wide range of formulations — A great address capture application must let users speak an address in the way that is most intuitive and natural to them.
• Pronunciation optimization — There are are over hundreds of thousands of different street names and several thousands city names. Having accurate pronunciations for this large vocabulary is essential, not only for speech recognition, but also when using TTS to confirm addresses.
• Systematic tuning — NuEcho has by far the most comprehensive suite of tuning tools and technologies in the industry. With our corpus of several hundred thousand real address utterances, we have thoroughly tuned every single aspect of this application.
• Extensive call analysis — We have analyzed thousands of address capture calls in order to identify and fix usability - and other - problems with the application.

In other words, a great application is the sum of a large number of small details which, taken together, add up to huge gains in automation rate and user experience.

Performance matters

A poorly performing application will deteriorate - if not altogether destroy - the business case of a project. Perhaps more importantly, a poor application can and will leave a negative impression on users.

There is a point where the cost savings afforded by a self-service application just aren't worth the damage that is being done to an organization's image. That's when an application gets pulled out, thereby throwing away huge investments in time and money.

NuAddress: A turnkey address capture solution Recognizing the importance of accuracy and performance, Nu Echo has spent several years developing and tuning NuAddressTM, a VoiceXML module that captures an address through an effective and natural dialog with a caller. NuAddress is a proven and field-tested product conceived to be deployed quickly, easily, and without surprises. Because we know that each organization is different, NuAddress has been designed to be easily integrated in a large variety of environments and to be easily customized in order to meet the specific requirements of each organization. In addition, you get the benefit of addresses that have been validated by official source databases and that strictly comply with Official Addressing Guidelines, therefore possibly enabling you to reduce your mailing costs.

The benefits of a field-proven product

Proven performance — For several years, NuAddress has been processing thousands of calls every day for our customers while consistently delivering unbeatable success rates.

Great user experience — A positive and rewarding experience with the application not only contributes to increasing success rate, but it also directly translates into higher customer satisfaction.

Fast deployment time — NuAddress can be up and running quickly, therefore minimizing project delays.

Risk minimization — Relying on a product that has consistently demonstrated its performance in the field for several years eliminates a significant project risk.

Consistent and reliable update service — Insures that address data used by the application is always up-to-date.

Key characteristics of NuAddress

Across USA and Canada coverage — Supports all street addresses from official source databases.

Conformance with Postal Service Addressing Guidelines — Produces addresses that are validated by the latest edition of postal service databases and strictly comply with postal services addressing guidelines.

Monthly update service — A new data update is produced for every monthly release of the postal address database, insuring the best possible coverage of US and Canadian addresses, as well as conformance with the addresses in the postal service databases. These updates include required data integrity checks, addition of new data normalizers, grammar updates as required, QA, and packaging.

Full change of address mode — In addition to capturing a new address, the application can also collect the effective date, as well as the new telephone number. For simple scenarios, this makes it possible to use NuAddress as a complete change of address application.

Flexible configuration and integration — NuAddress has been designed to be easy to integrate and configure. The application can even be dynamically configured at run-time for each call by passing the appropriate parameters on the URL.

Solution deployed in a WAR file — Ensures a self-contained solution.

No database required at run-time — The application is self-contained so there is no need for a complicated database setup.

Extensive logging — The application logs very detailed information that can easily be loaded in a database for reporting and call viewing purposes.