Gannett Company, Inc. Chooses VoicePort

Media giant Gannett engages VoicePort to implement CircPort™ IVR to speed circulation phone calls with speech recognition.

Pittsford, NY (PRWEB) April 20, 2007 -- Gannett has selected VoicePort's industry-leading circulation Integrated Voice Response (IVR), CircPort™, to be installed at its newest call center, serving 27 of its daily newspapers. Headquartered in McLean, Va., Gannett has operations in 41 states and worldwide. With a combined circulation in its newspaper group of approximately 7.2 million subscribers, Gannett has the highest newspaper circulation in the U.S.

CircPort speeds circulation phone calls by using advanced speech recognition to understand and automatically process routine caller requests such as vacation holds, delivery problems and payments. Once CircPort is deployed, Gannett subscribers at these papers can access their accounts 24/7. Each of the 27 newspapers will have the ability to independently configure the application to best meet both their needs and those of their individual subscribers. The application is directly integrated into Gannett's proprietary circulation database to process transactions in real-time.

"Our vision is for consumers to choose Gannett media for their news and information needs, anytime, anywhere, in any form," said Robert Althaus, Vice President of Circulation for Gannett. "CircPort promises to help us deliver on that vision by offering our customers the latest in 24/7 service that they have come to expect in today's world."

"Gannett turned to us as the recognized industry leader," said Chris Mann, VoicePort President. "Our speech automation applications are quickly becoming the preferred choice for Interactive Voice Response (IVR) in the newspaper industry because our products help media firms consistently manage subscriber interaction at a corporate level while meeting the needs of individual newspapers through highly customizable and configurable solutions."

"As we implement CircPort at our newest Center Of Excellence, we will build on our mission to successfully transform Gannett to the new environment," said Dave Orth, Director of Corporate Telecom at Gannett. "And because speech recognition technology provides a natural conversational interaction, we are confident our customers will have an outstanding caller experience."

About VoicePort
VoicePort is the leading provider of advanced speech recognition applications to over 100 of the top daily newspapers in the U.S. The CircPort™ application is offered in both on-premise and hosted models, fully integrating with the major industry and proprietary circulation databases. The CircPort suite of circulation solutions also includes WebPort™ and Dispatch, products that help newspapers increase customer satisfaction and interaction. To find out more about our products and services, please visit www.voiceport.net.

About Gannett Company, Inc.
Gannett Co., Inc. is a leading international news and information company that publishes 90 daily newspapers in the USA, including USA TODAY, the nation's largest-selling daily newspaper. The company also owns nearly 1,000 non-daily publications in the USA and USA WEEKEND, a weekly newspaper magazine. Gannett subsidiary Newsquest is the United Kingdom's second largest regional newspaper company. Newsquest publishes nearly 300 titles, including 18 daily newspapers, and a network of prize-winning Web sites. Gannett also operates 23 television stations in the United States and is an Internet leader with sites sponsored by its TV stations and newspapers including USATODAY.com, one of the most popular news sites on the Web. For more information, please visit www.gannett.com.

###