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Reliant
Gets Fast Sales Data with Interactive Voice Response System
News
Story by Bob
Brewin
MARCH
15, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD)
- Ronald J. Calderone, CIO at Reliant
Pharmaceuticals LLC, discovered that when it comes to
building a sales force automation system, the human voice
makes for a very good interface—at a very good price.
Reliant, a privately held
company in Liberty Corner, N.J., that sells hypertension
beta-blockers and cardiac drugs, needed timely data from its
salespeople, who call on physicians who prescribe such
medications. But Calderone quickly determined that it would
cost $4 million to $6 million to equip Reliant's sales
force, which is projected to grow to 900, with handheld
computers and link them into a sales force automation system
like those used by major drug companies. He simply didn't
have that money in his budget.
That's when Calderone
decided to tap an asset the salespeople already had—their
voices—and couple that with an interactive voice-response
(IVR) system called Victor, which stands for Voice
Interactive Tracking & Operations Repository. The system
provides the company with detailed and timely data on sales
calls accessible from a SQL database.
While Calderone declines to
provide specific financial details, he says Reliant
developed Victor using a combination of commercial
speech-recognition technologies for "a couple of
hundred thousand dollars." He says the system, which
the company started building in early 2002 and rolled out to
its entire sales force about a year later, "had a
payback of much less than a year."
Dan Miller, an analyst at
Zelos Group Inc. in San Francisco, says IVR systems offer a
low-cost alternative to mobile hardware and sales force
automation software.
"[IVR] systems are not
expensive, and they're not rocket science," Miller
says.
"The true payback is timeliness," says Calderone,
who notes that before Victor, the Reliant sales force used
paper forms for call reports. That information took eight
weeks to trickle in from an outside data entry contractor.
Now, Reliant gets the results of those sales calls
overnight, he says.
Using voice prompts, Victor
guides sales personnel through a series of questions
analogous to data fields, such as doctors called, location,
practice and other information. Responses are stored in a
SQL database. Victor is so easy to use, Calderone says, that
user training takes about an hour.
Robin McWilliams, Reliant's
manager for telecommunications, says it wasn't any more
difficult to integrate data from Victor into the company's
systems than it would be to integrate any other type of
data. Thanks to Victor, "voice is just another form of
data," he says.
Though Reliant built Victor
with existing IVR software and hardware, including Dialogic
voice-processing boards from Intel Corp. and speech software
from Nuance Communications Inc. and the Sony Pictures
division of Sony Corp., Calderone says the company has 32
patents pending on Victor. He adds that Reliant is now
looking for a marketing partner to sell the system—which
could further add to this project's payback.
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