Contact centres or call centres are used extensively in the financial sector.  What we are proposing is the development of a telephone contact simulator -- essentially an interactive multimedia package which recognises what the trainee is saying and responds in an appropriate and realistic way.  The technology has reached a point where this looks to be quite practical.

What would be involved?

Our partnership of trainers, financial call centres and technology specialists in the UK, Greece, Czech Republic and Austria would develop realistic content for the simulator and test it with call centre staff.  This would be a two-year project.  The main working language would be English, but versions of the courseware and reports would be developed in Greek, Czech and German.

Our main Greek partner would be VoiceWeb www.voiceweb.gr who specialise in advanced speech technology and have worked extensively with the financial sector.

What would you get out of this?

During the life of the pilot project, simulation courseware would be available free of charge to financial organisations who operate call centres / telephone customer contact centres for testing purposes.  On completion of the project, a free report would be available on our findings -- how to use voice-based simulation for training call centre agents, how to develop courseware and how effective it is as a training medium.

Once the pilot project is complete, it would be our intention to develop this into a commercial service for developing simulation courseware. 

What are the timescales?

We submitted an outline proposal to the UK National Agency for the Leonardo programme on October 1st 2004.  If this is approved, we develop a more detailed proposal.  If this is accepted, the project would run during 2005 and 2006.

What happens next?

If you might be interested, please contact Adrian Tayler at Enlightenment Interactive, either by phone 01695 727555 or e-mail.

For more information about the EU Leonardo Programme click this link.

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