Nuance OnDemand Platform

Open Architecture

The Nuance OnDemand platform is a Nuance hosted pay-as-you-use platform built and operated with the security and reliability that Enterprises demand.  The platform easily integrates to your existing ACD and CTI systems while continuously delivering the latest natural language IVR and mobile virtual assistant self-service to your customers. The core functions include an open, high availability cloud-based architecture, extensive monitoring and seamless maintenance and upgrades. 

• The platform is geographically redundant and load-balanced, uses separate power grids, and battery power back-up.  It's built for 100% uptime and currently processes 7.5B conversational interactions each year.  There's no larger conversational platform in the world.
• We rigorously test and re-test our business continuity plans so you can relax knowing you've partnered with the best.
• Nuance thoroughly monitors the platform 24x7x365, including caller impacting application performance to ensure the optimal self-service experience for every single call and every single mobile interaction.
• We operate at 180% of planned capacity so you never have to worry about call spikes.  Pay as you use.  Reap the rewards of a better customer experience and higher automated self-service rates.
• Our data centers are in compliance/certified according to stringent security standards, including: SOX, ISO 27k, PCI DSS, and HIPAA (WIP). 
• To maximize your flexibility and optimize the level of control you'd like to maintain, your VoiceXML apps can be hosted by Nuance or you can host them in your own data centers.

Superior Network Services and Operations
Our operations teams are the backbone of Nuance OnDemand's superior quality and reliability. Fundamental in our service delivery approach is to work closely with each customer to deeply understand your needs and to exceed your expectations, from day one forward. This is how we work together to consistently deliver great customer experiences. Every time your customers call, we answer. 

Proactive Eco-system Monitoring
Answering the call is just the first step in superior customer interactions. We proactively monitor the health of the entire self-service ecosystem, regardless of where components are deployed or who owns them. This means real-time monitoring of the application infrastructure, of application response latency, of your connected backend data systems and even third-party data systems. Our goal: to detect potential problems and correct them BEFORE they impact your customers.

Improving Customer Experience Quality
More than infrastructure, we closely monitor the actual perception your customers have of service quality. We track how long it takes to answer every call, how accurately the system understands what your customers say, and the time it takes for the system to respond. These metrics, along with the expertise to reliably and rapidly make application changes, ensure we maximize the quality of your customers' experience.

Best Practices Honed From Experience
With Nuance On Demand, you also gain the full expertise of the largest professional services organization in the world focused on evolving mobile and IVR customer care. From 3,000+ deployed applications across all industries, we have the historical data and best practices to deliver self-service that will set you apart and save cost.

Security & Reliability

Nuance technology handles over 12B calls annually for the world's leading Enterprises and Service Providers. As the largest hosted speech platform in the world, the Nuance OnDemand platform takes security to an entirely new level by proactively addressing issues related to privacy, data confidentiality, customer authentication, data integrity, non-repudiation, access control, and communication security. Operating 24x7, 365 days a year, our multi-layer security mitigates many levels of threats to your customers' information so that you effortlessly and consistently provide quality customer service.

Security Framework

Physical Security: systems are housed in isolated segments within SAS 70 certified data center locations. Data center physical security employs four broad categories:

• Confidentiality – Ensure that only authorized users can access any physical layer of our hosted infrastructure.
• Integrity – Ensure access approval policy is continuously monitored and executed.
• Authentication – Ensure multiple levels of authentication in the system.
• Audit Trail – Ensure full historical reporting of any physical access.

Network Security: Information and the systems on which it resides interconnected by networks are important business assets. Maintaining, and ensuring network security at all levels is essential. Nuance achieves this network security through both technical means and administrative level controls.

Platform Security: Nuance network services engineers harden the operating systems and infrastructure to protect its systems from various security vulnerabilities. Servers must deliver data in a secure, reliable fashion. Operating system, middleware and application hardening involves:

• Security sensitive installations
• Implementations and configurations of robust logging
• Encryption of sensitive communications
• Prudent configuration of access controls, "least privilege" and "need-to-know"
• Strong authentication

Administration Security: Nuance ensures segregation of duties as a method for reducing the risk of accidental or deliberate system misuse. Due diligence with policies, process and procedures prevents any single person from accessing, modifying or using assets without authorization or detection.

Access and Control Security: Nuance employees' access to sensitive data is granted on a need-to-have basis only, considering an employee's job role and the problem at hand. Each username is uniquely assigned to a person and assigned to a centrally defined role with associated privileges. The platform also provides a mechanism to mask or encrypt callers' audio data. Nuance clients provide a public key and determine the encryption scheme for audio data. Only the client can decrypt the caller audio utterances and play them using the decryption key and a tool provided. All Nuance computers and terminals auto-lock after 15 minutes

Application Security: Nuance Products and Professional Services organizations adopted the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) as our framework for security standards in software and application development. Product design documents and customer-specific Statements Of Work Documents specify the security framework requirements as defined in OWASP guidelines. The design documents are translated to an agile development methodologyas tasked for development and QA efforts. Nuance's Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) ensures for the implementation of Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) as part of its application software security development framework.

Tools & Reporting

Nuance OnDemand gives you the tools and technology to measure, improve and react to your customer and business demands. Every day for every interaction, you’ll have the best reporting and analytics, plus IVR with agent call analysis tools to provide you the actionable insights that translate into innovation and savings. 

• With more than 3,000 speech deployments in 23 languages, Nuance provides benchmarks of your KPIs across your industry to ensure you’re a step ahead of the competition
• Secure, Web-based reporting dashboard provides critical access to insight for all stakeholders
• Easy to understand pie charts, bar graphs or data table representations with click-to drill-down analysis of call details
• Voice analytics for IVR that also includes the agent portion of the call for more thorough analysis
• Self-service interaction analysis that shows a single customer view across your mobile application and IVR

Nuance OnDemand's real-time application change tools can be used for updates to your routing rules, to add or change prompts or even to update a grammar in real-time—providing you the flexibility and speed you need in this rapidly changing environment. For example, if your callers are requesting an option that the grammar hadn’t been programmed to recognize, you can add a new expected response and instructions on how to handle the new response such as to transfer to a specific agent group—all without a single coding change. Application functions and prompts can even be scheduled with start and stop times, which will be extremely helpful for planned events, such as during tax season.

• Tools to make real-time grammar, prompt, routing, and even other application changes
• Easy facilitation of A/B testing with reports for easy understanding and to guide deployment of the best performing functions
• Secure logging, roll-back and scheduling functions

Technology Innovations

Nuance OnDemand includes automatic updates with the hottest natural language, newest text to speech and audio advancements, personalization tools and mobile self-service innovations. As a Nuance OnDemand customer, you often get the benefit 12+ months earlier than with any other provider and can recognize 20-30% performance improvement over other systems. And we even guarantee it! With Nuance OnDemand, you can be confident that you'll always be one step ahead of the competition. In a single, unified platform you get the latest

• Natural Language Understanding with unmatched performance experience
• Speech Recognition from the pioneers of the technology- Nuance
• Nuance Voice Fonts and Vocalizer Text-to-Speech for the smoothest dynamically concatenated audio, same-talent voice synthesis, and better sounding IVR. And, you can give your mobile apps a voice using that same Voice Font!
• ACD and CTI functionality for smart, integrated agent routing
• Integrated proactive voice and SMS notifications and alerts
• Callback Manager to provide your callers the option to get a callback rather than waiting on hold
• Advanced reporting with actionable insights
• Voice Biometrics and voice print technology
• Nina Mobile Solutions for a virtual assistant experience extended to mobile customer care.