This is the first in a series of stories about retailers bolstering their Web sites in time for the 2005 holiday shopping season. Stay tuned for more.

It's the high season for catalog retailer Hammacher Schlemmer, and that means its call centers are inundated with phone orders and questions about the company's lineup of unusual apparel, electronics and home items.

"Even with the call center fully staffed, we can't take all the calls we get," says Don Rogers, vice president of operations at the Fairfield, Ohio-based retailer.

To meet peak call volumes, Hammacher Schlemmer augments its staff with third-party call center services. Beginning this holiday season, it's also using speech-recognition technology to automatically handle some of the more straightforward calls, such as those related to order status and catalog requests.

The technology that automates these calls is from Voxify. The vendor's speech applications don't employ the familiar "Press or say 1" methods that some interactive voice response (IVR) systems do. Rather, Voxify's speech-enabled applications are programmed to navigate natural conversational exchanges.

Built-in features include the ability for automated agents to adjust and respond to a caller, as opposed to simply following predefined call paths. The agents can pause when a caller needs more time, repeat and clarify what a caller is asking for, and offer options.

This conversational approach is one of the primary reasons Hammacher Schlemmer chose Voxify's software, Rogers says. The retailer had considered using speech-enabled technology in the past to handle customer calls, but wasn't satisfied with sterile, inflexible IVR products that might have turned away customers.

"We've looked at doing this a number of different times over the years. We never would have done it with [traditional IVR], and we never would have done it with the traditional business model -- which is you make this huge investment in hardware and software development, and then you hope you get a payback," Rogers says. "We're not big enough. We can't make those kind of investments."

Voxify's technology is user-friendly and clean enough that customers will accept it, he says. In addition, the software is hosted, so the retailer didn't have to invest in any on-premises hardware or software. Voxify only charges Hammacher Schlemmer for calls that get handled by the automated agents.

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