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By Andy McCue, 28 July 2003 13:11

NEWS Royal Mail is slashing call centre costs for its special delivery tracking service by half using automated speech recognition software. Although the Royal Mail has had an internet facility for customers to check the status of letters and parcels sent by registered delivery for some time, most queries are handled over the telephone by call centre agents. But after a six-month £500,000 'proof of concept' project using voice recognition technology from Nuance, Royal Mail is to continue with the automated system, having saved around £300,000 already. Customers using the 'track and trace' telephone facility are now greeted by an automated voice asking for their special delivery reference number. Once the customer has repeated the code, the voice recognition system picks it up, verifies it with the back-end system and informs the caller whether the parcel has been delivered or not. Andy Fergusson, project manager at the Royal Mail's technology partner CSC, told silicon.com that resources are freed up because instead of all two million calls a year going through to a live agent, half are now handled automatically. "We are able to redeploy those agents onto other contracts, so we still have them doing something else. Plans are afoot to look at other applications it can be used in," he said. The track and trace service began in 1993 and has been offered online since the late 1990s, with the 24-hour automated telephone service the latest addition.