Transactional voice solutions technology vendors to net over $300 million by ''08: Datamonitor

A new report by independent market analyst, Datamonitor (DTM.L) predicts a seven-fold rise in global enterprise expenditure on transactional-enabling voice solutions. The report, Emerging voice applications: towards voice transactions, predicts global voice-enabled transactional solutions will earn technology vendors revenues of $377m by year end 2008 compared to $56m today.

Voice-automated self-service interfaces allow end-users to conduct commercial transactions and have the potential to help companies reduce variable overhead costs and are also ideal for expanding self-service revenue generation.

According to Peter Ryan, Datamonitor'stechnology analyst and author of the report "Not so long ago, e-Commerce was heralded by many as a 'flash in the pan' technology. Many of those sceptics are also predicting short life for transactional voice solutions too. But should vendors continue to produce solid offerings that customers enjoy using, the sceptics will be proven wrong once again."

The report predicts growth in Asia-Pacific to be strong, because of the growth of the 'voice business' in Japan, China, Australia and New Zealand.

The most popular transactional voice solutions currently in use include account management, order processing, pay-as-you-go top-up and reservations. From the standpoint of account management, the main provisions being deployed by enterprises include bill payment provisions, which are proving popular with both telcos and utilities.

Reservation applications are finding tremendous traction in the contact centre-heavy travel and tourism verticals. Not only are hotel and automobile reservation firms finding the technology helpful from the standpoint of lowering facility and wage overheads, but end-users appreciate their efficient and straightforward nature.

Pay-as-you-go is a favourite among mobile telco providers. In this industry, the key selling point for voice transactional services relates to the ability to add credit to a mobile telephone by using the human voice. This is significantly more functional than using DTMF (touch-tone) and is not as constraining as topping-up via web sites.

Order management has, perhaps, the most mass-market potential. Using this functionality, end-users can access enterprise voice portals and order goods and services, as they could do speaking to a live agent or using a web site. These solutions are ideal for the retail sector.

According to Datamonitor, in North America and Europe, the Middle-East and Africa (EMEA), uptake in transactional voice solutions will be substantial, accounting for 75 per cent of the global market by 2008. Growth in Asia-Pacific (APAC) will also be strong, due to voice business proliferation in Japan, China and Australia / New Zealand. However, Datamonitor says it is unlikely that transactional technology will be adopted on a massive scale in the Caribbean and Latin America (CALA), due to legacy technology and economic limitations.

"North America and EMEA are the primary markets for transactional voice technology. This is due mainly to the massive growth in mobile telephony over the past 10 years, coupled with the increasing acceptance of e-commerce as a self-service tool," says Ryan. "However, vendors of these solutions should keep their finger on the pulse of APAC, where some of the most innovative transactional applications are currently being deployed."

In terms of vertical markets, Ryan notes there are already several of them who have adopted voice transactional technology in their customer dealings. "Retail banking, investments, telcos and utilties have all begun to embrace the revenue generating potential of transactional voice solutions", says Ryan.

However, besides these early adopters, there is tremendous scope in the retail, insurance, independent financial services and the public sector. "It will be up to forward-thinking vendors to develop solutions around these industries to allow enterprises to continue using speech technology to maintain satisfied customers, as well as expand revenue channels," concludes Ryan.