Southernwood Consulting - Technology for a Connected World

How effective and efficient is your Interactive Voice Response system (IVR) or Automated Attendant? Are your customers getting lost in IVR hell, never quite getting where they want to be?

Southernwood Consulting has vast experience in IVR best-practice - the practice of getting callers to where they need to be as quickly and effectively as possible. From the simplest Auto-attendant menu structure to the most complex interactive systems such as voicemail or prepaid systems with PIN numbers and Automatic Speech Response (ASR), we are well-positioned to assist from both an architecture and a design point of view.

Is your organization a high-tech company or telecommunications equipment/software/service vendor? We can help you with technical product development, discreetly review your portfolio, or evaluate the deployment potential of an existing product in a new market or network customer. We can also help you with defining the requirement specification from a customer to ensure you deliver the right thing, first time, on time and within budget.

How do you keep you telecom spend from growing out of control?

Telecom fraud is also a reality, and can end up costing an organization thousands, and sometimes even millions of dollars. There are many ways to ensure you pay only what you need to in order to stay in contact with your key stakeholders.

We begin by reviewing your telecom infrastructure and actual communication requirements to assess if there is a discrepancy. The next step is to determine contact requirements, calling patterns, and cost hot-zones. These are areas where spend is considerably higher than expected, and can identify misconfiguration, ongoing fraud, or inefficient routing. We derive a plan to address the immediate challenges, and a plan for ongoing internal assessment to ensure that any measures that are implemented stay current, or are updated when necessary.

We also provide leadership on new technologies that can drive down communication overheads. Contact to find out how efficiently your communications technology is operating.

We use these legacy terms loosely. Communications, whether text, voice, video or multimedia, is converging at a rapid pace. In tribute to the decades of switchboards, key-systems and PABXs, we have this separate section focused on mainly voice communications within an organization.

Southernwood Consulting has years of experience in diverse environments from Africa to Canada in providing customized advice on the most cost-effective and flexible ways for an organization's staff, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders to communicate.

Let us help you strategize, plan and execute a replacement, expansion or change to your communications infrastructure or methodology. We can help you assess your readiness for and appropriateness of VoIP/IP Telephony for your unique situation. IVR, voicemail/unified messaging, CTI, contact center, remote extensions, least-cost routing, codecs, wireless. These are all terms we are more than comfortable with.

Today, we split wireless into two sub-categories: local wireless (WiFi, Wimax, etc.) and mobile (CDMA, GSM, 3G, etc.). We recognize, however, and look forward to the wide-spread convergence of these technologies both within devices and services.

Southernwood Consulting can help with the effective usage of technologies in both these segments. For example, have you considered a wireless strategy encompassing customer campaigns using technologies such as text messaging (SMS), picture messaging (MMS) and wireless internet? Are you using or planning to use your wireless network to extend your communications infrastructure, such as utilizing wireless handsets, or dual-mode handsets that roam from the Public Mobile network (CDMA/GSM) to your local network when you step into the office? We can help you with that.

Let us help you with your wireless strategy today.