Spanlink's Web Q&A Software Deployed at Humana Military Healthcare Services for Next-Generation Web Self-Help.

MINNEAPOLIS -- Provides customers with a choice for responsive, high-quality service through the Web

Spanlink Communications, a leading IP communications and contact center solution provider, today announced that Humana Military Healthcare Services (HMHS), a subsidiary of Humana Inc., one of the largest and most innovative publicly owned health insurance companies in the nation, has deployed Spanlink's Web Q&A, a self-help solution that provides a fast and easy way for their providers and beneficiaries to find answers to their questions on the HMHS Web site.

Spanlink's Web Q&A product incorporates patented, natural language-based question-answering technology that enables users to easily and quickly find answers to their questions on a company's Web site without the aid of an agent.

According to John Jones, Director of Innovative Technologies at HMHS, "We have been extremely pleased with the ability of Spanlink's Web Q&A to provide our customers with the correct answer to their question. The interface is very easy compared to tools that perform a word match type search. As more customers use the product, we look for a decrease in calls to our call center."

Web Q&A leverages Spanlink's patented natural language understanding technology, which allows customer service and support centers to provide precise answers to customer inquiries, without human intervention, for Web, email and phone applications. The application understands questions and the content of an organization's diverse information sources. The benefits include: 1) customers are able to ask or type questions in their own words; 2) the software delivers the precise answers, not thousands of potentially relevant documents; 3) increases accuracy, and reduces response times and man-hours for retrieving information.

Web Q&A is available on HMHS' beneficiary and provider sites in The Answer Place. http://hmd.humana-military.com/South/Bene/TAP/TAPMain.asp and http://hmd.humana-military.com/South/provider/Tap/TAPMain.asp. In a subsequent phase, Humana plans to leverage this product as a tool for their agents to find precise answers more quickly when serving customers over the phone.

"Web Q&A linguistically "understands" the content and intent of user queries and identifies appropriate sub-document segments as answers," said Greg Whittemore, Director of Intelligent Information Products of Spanlink, "and it is powerful and flexible enough to access multiple information sources to deliver precise answers fast. For these reasons, the product is ideal for enterprises that answer large numbers of inquiries on content that draw from vast information sources - particularly for insurance, medical, finance, IT and some government organizations."

The natural language understanding technology underlying Spanlink's Web Q&A is the product of a 10-year and $25 million investment by SRI and the U.S. Government. Web Q&A is a Concentric Customer product - part of Spanlink's Concentric Solutions suite of products for customers, agents and supervisors. http://www.spanlink.com/products/products_cs_main.html#cs_customer

Spanlink Communications, Inc.

Spanlink Communications is a leading solution provider of IP communications and contact center solutions. Spanlink delivers next-generation customer interaction and IP Communications System Management products that maximize efficiency in a pure-IP or migratory environment. Spanlink is one of the leading reseller-integrators of Cisco Systems IP Communications and Contact Center products, including Cisco CallManager, and Cisco Intelligent Contact Management (ICM), Cisco IP Contact Center (IPCC) Enterprise, and Cisco Customer Voice Portal (formerly ISN) and IP-IVR. Find news and information at www.spanlink.com.