PR - SoundBite to Present at Credit and Collections for Utilities Conference

SoundBite Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: SDBT), a leading provider of on-demand automated voice messaging solutions, today announced that it will sponsor a luncheon where it will discuss how utilities can easily add SoundBite’s service to their existing customer contact strategy to recover outstanding revenue more efficiently.  The luncheon will include a brief overview of how energy and utility companies are using SoundBite today to communicate with customers and collect debt faster and at a lower cost.  Many of the largest utilities in the U.S. leverage SoundBite to collect debt, improve customer care, and quickly communicate important information to customers. 

”I’m excited to share with attendees how SoundBite can dramatically increase right-party contacts, penetrate calling lists faster and increase dollars collected per hour,” said Eric Keough, VP of Consumer Direct Strategy for SoundBite. “Our Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model enables utilities to quickly and cost-effectively create and deploy sophisticated calling campaigns that deliver personalized prerecorded messages based on type of debt, age of debt, likelihood to pay, and other unique characteristics.”

Utility providers are struggling with how to address late payers promptly and collect balances at an early stage while at the same time maintaining a positive relationship.  Using voice messaging, utilities can reduce the cost of debt collection and shrink the collections cycle by:

• Decreasing delinquencies by reaching out to late payers with effective, personalized messages
• Providing convenient, immediate access to self-service payment options
• Collecting more revenue within a shorter period of time using fewer agents
• Managing call volumes to keep agents busy, but not buried
• Ensuring the highest quality customer interaction
• Reducing cost-per-contact by automatically verifying the right party, thus increasing the percentage of agent time spent on high-value contacts.  

Nearly twenty utilities use SoundBite today for a variety of marketing, customer care and collections applications.  In addition to debt collection, some of the most widely adopted customer contact campaigns used by utilities include:

• Call avoidance campaigns to reduce inbound traffic
• Low-income energy assistance enrollment
• Maintenance schedule confirmations
• Billing choice enrollment
• Service interruption and outage notifications
• New bill format announcements
• Customer satisfaction surveys.

SoundBite’s flexible solution lets utilities create customer contact campaigns within days and view results in real time.  The on-demand automated voice messaging solution is an effective vehicle for delivering highly relevant automated messages to a large number of customers at a fraction of the cost of manual dialing, predictive dialers or direct mail.  In fact, one utility recently used SoundBite to enroll eligible customers in a low-income energy assistance program. The total cost per enrollment using SoundBite was $1.60 compared to $10.00 for direct mail. 

SoundBite’s SaaS-delivery model also eliminates the technical constraints found in traditional on-premise contact center solutions, such as limited telephony capacity and flexibility that have restricted contact centers from supporting seasonal and time-sensitive customer contact campaigns such as outage notifications and low-income assistance programs.  SoundBite’s hosted offering provides virtually unlimited calling capacity that enables utilities to periodically make a rapid succession of calls to reach customers within tight windows. 

SoundBite (Booth #31) is a sponsor of the 7th Annual Platt’s Credit and Collections for Utilities Conference which will be held February 26–28, 2008, at the Miami Beach Resort & Spa, in Miami, Florida.  For more information on how SoundBite can improve customer communications for utilities visit http://www.soundbite.com/industries/utilities#.