• Overview
• Who We Help
• Customers
• Customer Success Stories
• News & Press
  • Press Releases
  • In the News
• Events & Webinars
• Management Team
• Careers

Contact Solutions Helps NBC Launch Voter Alert Line for 2004 Presidential Election

IVR Application to Help Voters Report Problems or Irregularities

Reston, VA (October 25, 2004) - Contact Solutions, the leader in contact automation, announced its participation in the massive NBC News' political coverage initiative for the "Decision 2004" election. With its partner Intervoice, CSI will create The Voter Alert Line application (1-866-MYVOTE1) that will allow voters throughout the country to quickly report voting problems or irregularities at their local polling location to election officials.

If callers cannot successfully vote or don't feel as if their vote was captured for one reason or another, voters can call this toll free application and have the opportunity to leave up to a 60-second message (in either English or Spanish) as to what issue was encountered. The 60-second message of the problems they are facing left by callers will be captured as a voice file and then turned into a .wav file for NBC News. At the end of the call, an option will also be available to automatically patch callers to their local election offices for information about their local polling location. A team of analysts will examine the volume and the location of the calls and will analyze the content of individual calls for insight into local, regional or nationwide voting problems.

On Election Day, November 2, 2004, MSNBC.com will show data collected through the Voter Alert Line, displaying real-time "hot spots" with a high volume of calls reporting voting problems. As a key component of the application, the management and monitoring tool from Intervoice, Application View, will provide statistics in real time and users will be able to view information on national, state and congressional district levels. Application View includes patented reporting processes and sophisticated tracking user goals, events, DTMF and advanced speech recognition (ASR) statistics, number of callers, call duration, and other factors.

For example, if calls in Florida start spiking, indicating voters are having widespread issues, analysts can access a web portal developed by Contact Solutions that will create a map of problem areas as detected by the Application View tool from Intervoice. A state, region or city will light up and then the administrator can click on the blinking light within the portal to drill down to which county that's actually having issues. The administrator for NBC can then draw real-time statistics and retrieve .wav files, seeing statistics of actually what's happening in real time in that county.

Contact Solutions Chief Executive Officer Paul Logan said, "This is an exciting application that suits the On Demand IVR services model perfectly. NBC is looking to react to a specific event where the call volumes could be tremendous but for a very brief time period. The CSI underlying IVR architecture was developed to support such spikes in activity without any degradation in service whatsoever. We look forward to being a part of this event."

About Contact Solutions
Contact Solutions (CSI) saves its clients millions of dollars by improving their contact automation significantly while uplifting customer satisfaction levels. Deploying time-tested On Demand IVR services, world-class IVR applications and procedures, and an industry-leading project management approach around six distinct Centers of Excellence, the company has helped the contact center industry redefine contact automation standards. Large enterprises such as American Express, Delta Airlines, Motorola and many public sector entities benefit from the company's focused, cost-effective contact automation approach. Contact Solutions is based in Reston, VA. Visit Contact Solutions at www.contactsolutions.com.

© 2004 Contact Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved. All trademarks and company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners.