Council online self-service fails

According to a report, Web sites for councils in Worcestershire are not good enough, reports Worcester News.

It says, the Web sites for Worcestershire county, Worcester city, Malvern Hills and Wychavon district councils have all been slammed for not being customer-friendly. Visitors to the sites say they find them hard to use, and evidence suggests the demand is there to use them more often if they can be improved.

Plans are in place to implement improvements, which are needed to help encourage more people to use self-service mechanisms, such as paying bills online, which, in turn, saves councils money, the paper reports.

A provider of on-demand call centre software, Five9 has released Self-Service IVR, says TMC Net.

Five9 says Self-Service IVR, an on-demand Interactive Voice Response (IVR) with speech recognition, may be ordered from Five9 as a stand-alone product or in combination with either the Five9 inbound call centre or blended (inbound and outbound) call centre.

Five9 explained that its Self-Service IVR leverages the latest in advanced speech recognition technology to analyse spoken input from callers and provide appropriate responses.

SoloHealth, a self-directed healthcare provider, has expanded its unique self-service health screening units to address challenges marketers face in impacting consumers at the point of shopping, states 24-7 Press Release.

The enhanced self-service health screening units will give shopper marketing initiatives the individual targeting of premium online media. This will be combined with the interactivity and engagement of mobile, in local high-traffic retail environments across the US, only a few feet from product shelves.

Enabled by a $1.2 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, SoloHealth will be rolling out the enhanced devices in 2011.