Astral Brands Implements Apptera's Next-Generation Voice Solutions to Help Increase Revenue Generation.

LAS VEGAS -- Apptera, the leader in Next-Generation Voice Solutions, today announced that multi-channel retailer Astral Brands has implemented its technology to speech-enable their customer service interactions. Astral Brands, a leader in multichannel retailing with brands spanning health and beauty products, gourmet foods and home decor items, is headquartered in Atlanta, GA. In addition to processing orders, providing order status, and responding to FAQs, the Apptera technology will be used to provide intelligent campaigns to callers to up-sell and cross-sell the Astral Brands.

Apptera's campaign management solutions allow retail businesses to quickly and easily create marketing promotions to educate, inform, and up-sell their callers. Once installed, Apptera's Campaign Manager allows marketing and business executives to create, manage and modify phone-based campaigns in a matter of minutes. Currently, Apptera intelligent voice solutions are used by some of the world's leading sporting goods, electronics, footwear, home improvement and clothing retailers.

"We chose Apptera for two main reasons," stated Bob Baker, Chief Marketing Officer at Astral Brands. "First and foremost, we wanted a solution that lived up to our high standards of customer experience; one that offers the ability to up-sell and cross-sell our many products. Next, we wanted this solution to integrate multiple back-office systems to leverage the wealth of information we have about our customers. Since the initial implementation, we have seen an outstanding 7% increase in our Revenue per Order."

"We are pleased to provide Astral Brands with what they have been looking for," commented Marketta Silvera, CEO of Apptera. "Astral is a truly innovative leader in retailing. They understand the future of e-business over the phone channel -- v-Business."

Apptera and Astral have completed the first stage of implementation and placed into production fully interactive, speech-based order capture, order status, and informational applications that are integrated with 4 of Astral's Brands including the Linda Anderson Catalog.

About Apptera

More than 1800 enterprises worldwide use Apptera's award-winning voice solutions to help callers manage their personal accounts, find locations and track customer orders. As the pioneer of v-Business, Apptera helps businesses dramatically increase revenues through its campaign management capabilities by intelligently automating the up-sell and cross-sell of products and services. Founded in 2001, Apptera is a privately held Silicon Valley-based technology company funded by leading venture capital firms. For additional information, Apptera can be reached at [phone] or www.apptera.com.