SoundBite and Latitude Software Announce Partnership on Collection Functionality

SoundBite Communications Inc., a leading provider of hosted, automated customer contact solutions, and Latitude Software, a leading supplier of collection software, today announced a partnership to provide the collection industry with an innovative solution that tightly integrates Latitude’s collection management system with SoundBite’s hosted, automated voice messaging solution to recover debt faster and improve operational efficiencies.

SoundBite and Latitude are developing a joint solution that integrates collection processes across the agent desktop and the debtor list exchange to improve agent performance by increasing debt collected per hour while lowering operational costs. The combined solution will automatically verify right party contacts and deliver that information to the agent desktops before the agents answer the calls. This integrated solution can also fully automate the collection process by giving debtors the option of paying their debt via agentless transactions.

SoundBite’s hosted, automated voice messaging solution integrates with Latitude’s open architecture collection management system via SOAP/XML and requires no additional hardware or software. The result is a highly flexible, automated solution that penetrates calling lists faster than predictive dialers and manual calling to accelerate debt collection; increase right party contacts, resulting in smarter agent utilization; and reduce overall telephony and call center costs.

“SoundBite is committed to delivering cost-effective, innovative solutions to help the collection industry recover the billions of dollars of outstanding debt that is charged off each year,” said Peter Shields, President and CEO of SoundBite Communications. “Collection contact centers will no longer be bound by the limitations of legacy platforms and can now realize the benefits of a truly integrated agent productivity solution without undertaking a major engineering development effort.”

“Latitude Software and SoundBite have put together a unique and differentiated set of capabilities which will offer tremendous productivity gains to our joint clients,” said Carl Harkleroad, President of Latitude Software. “Our partnership with SoundBite is well-aligned with our strategy to continually grow our capabilities to take advantage of the increasing technological advances available to the industry, and to provide bottom-line benefit to our clients.”