Most companies have developed separate technology infrastructures to serve Web customers and phone callers. Each channel has its own business logic, set of hardware, and integration to back-end systems. In 2001, E*TRADE wanted to add speech recognition to their telephone systems. The headache and costs involved with upgrades drove their interest in finding another way to handle the problem.

E*TRADE chose to outsource the telecom and speech challenges to Tellme and use their existing Internet data to consolidate their Web and phone self-service. “By tying our phone system to our Web infrastructure, we’ve been able to innovate customer phone services as easily as we evolve our Web offerings and reduce overall customer service costs,” said Joseph Raymond, E*TRADE Financial.

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Beginning with the re-launch of automated stock trading, 1-800-STOCKS-1, E*TRADE successfully unified its Web and phone channels and now utilizes the same set of Internet infrastructure, business logic, and middleware to power both customer touch points. The new platform also simplified and sped-up the menus to enable easier customer access to common content, resulting in increased use of the automated system (and higher trading volumes) along with improved caller satisfaction ratings.

In the last year, E*TRADE continued to move more of its customer service numbers off the old telephony hardware. Today, self-service Web applications running on Tellme’s platform are used to answer calls to 1-800-STOCKS-5 for portfolio customer service and 1-800-ET-BANK-1 for the growing business of banking over the phone.

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