In a significant corporate move, Nuance has signed an agreement to purchase Washington State-based mobile self-service technology provider SNAPin, a $180 million stock deal set to close in October. SNAPin’s software intercepts customer service calls which are dialed from mobile phones to carriers. It then displays a GUI menu on the handset screen through which the user can make transactions, such as checking their balance or purchasing minutes. While Nuance’s other mobile offerings like Voice Search or Voice Control exist on the user’s handset, SNAPin’s technology requires no download and comes from the carrier end. Merging its mobility solutions with its customer care solutions, Nuance intends to integrate SNAPin into its recently announced Mobile Care software.
The SNAPin deal is in line with Nuance’s recent efforts to harness various mobile markets through acquisitions. In 2006, Nuance purchased Mobile Voice Control, whose embedded speech recognition command-and-control technology it leveraged into Nuance Voice Control. On August 24, 2007, Nuance officially acquired VoiceSignal from which it developed Nuance Voice Search. The company also acquired Tegic on the same date, a company most notable for its T9 predictive text technology, as well as BeVocal, from which Nuance developed the recently unveiled Nuance Mobile Care solution.
Powered by Nuance OnDemand, Mobile Care gives mobile callers access to self-service applications directly on their handsets. The technology is a significant development in that it is the first automated customer care solution designed specifically for mobile handset users. Like the Tegic deal, the SNAPin agreement is another example of a nominal speech company buying up non-speech offerings. In this case, the logic is clear: in order to offer complete customer care on a mobile phone, Nuance has to leverage the GUI interface as well as speech.
The SNAPin deal is advantageous to Nuance in that it will absorb what had previously been a competing technology: BeVocal had been researching a similar application. Now, however, at least from Nuance’s perspective, there are no significant competitors in the technological space previously occupied by SNAPin. This effectively gives the company first mover advantage. Even if other enterprises replicate the technology, Nuance can differentiate itself by supporting SNAPin’s software with an entire customer service suite.
Nuance also inherits SNAPin’s installed base of customers, most notably Vodafone, a mobile network operator with a large footprint in Europe and parts of Asia (particularly in India). Vodafone is currently finishing trials of SNAPin software and will launch in select markets by the end of this year. SNAPin also has in place another deal with a North American wireless carrier, as well as a handful of trials with other carriers.
While the initial targets of Nuance Mobile Care are carrier companies, with SNAPin, Nuance now has the technology to expand its offering to other verticals. As callers increasingly access contact centers on their mobile phones, leveraging the GUI can not only offer more efficient customer care but, by intercepting the call, can decrease the cost of operating a contact center.
SNAPin maintains its strongest presence in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, followed by the North American market. Thus, its addition to the Mobile Care stack could give Nuance a foothold should the enterprise decide to increase its push into Asia. While customer care in Asia is still largely in a rudimentary phase, a significant number of the populace in China, Japan, and Korea rely primarily on mobile phones which are cheaper than landlines. Therefore, Nuance’s readiness with a customer care solution designed specifically for mobile carriers could give the company an excellent entry point.
One of the problems Nuance will encounter is porting to different handsets, which have varying operating systems and – a problem which is unique to GUIs – screen sizes. SNAPin, however, has already encountered this problem for its technology and has worked to counteract it. Nuance can likely complement its own large porting and QA team with SNAPin’s contributions.
As with all interfaces, it is especially important that Nuance has a fallback should SNAPin for some reason be inaccessible to users. Otherwise, SNAPin’s intercept platform might serve to simply lock callers out of the contact center. It is essential that Nuance provide callers with a clear way to bypass SNAPin’s system, should circumstances necessitate such an action.
