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How was Bhrigus started? What kind of products and services does your company provide?
Bhrigus was started in 2002 and since then the firm has grown to a more than 120 employee company with a turnover of $4 mn.

The company is in the select band of high maturity organizations world wide that have been successfully assessed at CMM Level 4. Our primary focus is on delivering system development services in the area of IV, CTI and speech voice web. We are focused on business process improvements and cost reduction for our clients, through advanced speech and web based services.

Bhrigus is a leading provider of ERP and contact center solutions and we have successfully developed and deployed efficient, scalable and reliable solutions. We also provide strategic consulting services to leverage our clients' enterprise application investment for sustainable and competitive growth. We have a global partnership with AT&T and we are System Integrator partners with Avaya Global Connect.

What kind of presence do you have in the Indian market?
We have a center in Hyderabad, where development and R&D work takes place; our nerve center where all projects are offshored. Presently, we are working with CMU and IIIT on a research project on text to speech and speech recognition in various regional languages in India-no such product exists yet.

Which industry verticals would benefit from your voice solutions?
Bhrigus has participated in several verticals, addressing tree target business functions namely contact centers, HR services and customer servicing. In India, we are looking at the banking sector and telecom companies as potential clients. The banking industry is already looking at our solutions. Telcos are very active in this area due to the value added services that add up to the bottom line and top line in terms of revenues. Another industry which can be immensely benefited by our solutions, is Airlines. Airline industry have to get into self-service and they can leapfrog to the speech technology to maintain an edge and expand globally.

What are the benefits of utilizing speech technology in a contact center? How do we ensure quality service with respect to the accuracy level of the speech engines?
Training an agent in a contact center for so many processes is very difficult, since you have all the knowledge in the engine, there is no need of retraining or deploying more agents for another process. The service level of automated systems is very high and cannot be achieved with agents as there are many factors affecting them. The speech and voice engine also allows services such as intelligent routing where calls can be diverted in accordance with the history of the caller maintained by the system. In the US, we have seen the level of transaction go up from 20-30% to 60-80%.

Accuracy was a problem before 1997-98; after 1999 everything has changed. The development in voice, especially in the last five years, has led to a rise in the accuracy level of speech engines up to the production level of 99.5%.

How much IVR market are you panning to capture?
We provide end-to-end solutions to our clients. In the US, we provide very high-level consultancy for not only one but a host of platforms, contact centers, IVRs etc. We have partnered with Nortel and Avaya for providing and developing voice solutions. We are focusing on the software side of the market. We are going to provide solutions, which will help enterprises  move from touch-tone to dialogue, and speech solutions or from PSTN to IP based solutions. The software component of the market is around 10-20%. We are new but specialized on the speech side and we want to market and capture a high percentage.

Sonia Sharma
sonias@cybermedia.co.in